Addie Mae Collins

Outcome

unknown

In September 1963, Addie Mae Collins, a 14 year old Black girl, was killed in a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. She was in the church basement preparing for Sunday services when at least fifteen sticks of dynamite, planted beneath the church steps, exploded. Addie Mae was a student and active member of her church community. The bombing was carried out by white supremacists at a time when Birmingham had become a focal point of resistance to school desegregation and civil rights organizing. Her death, along with the deaths of three other young girls, shocked the nation and intensified public outrage over racial violence. Addie Mae Collins’s killing became one of the most tragic symbols of the costs borne by Black children during the struggle for civil rights.