Addie Mae Collins was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 18, 1949. She attended the 16th Street Baptist Church with her parents, Julius and Alice, as well as her six siblings. On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, 14-year-old Collins was in the church basement room with a group of other children.
At 10:22 a.m., a bomb exploded under the steps of the church. Collins was killed in the blast along with Denise McNair, 11, and Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, both 14. In addition to the four fatalities, more than 20 people were injured. Collins’ younger sister, Sarah, lost an eye and sustained other serious injuries. The bombing that killed Collins and her friends was a racially motivated hate crime.
Collins’ murder remained officially unsolved until the 1970s. Robert Chambliss, a member of a Ku Klux Klan group that was seen placing the dynamite under the church steps, was arrested in 1963 but tried only for illegal possession of explosives. The case remained dormant until 1971 when Attorney General William Baxley reopened it. He obtained FBI files containing substantive information, including the names of suspects, which had been withheld by J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s. In a later statement, the FBI stated that their investigation had been impeded by the lack of witness cooperation in Birmingham.
In 1977, a 73-year-old Chambliss was convicted of the murder of Collins and sentenced to life in prison. Two other perpetrators—Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry—were convicted in 2001 and 2002, respectively. A fourth suspect, Herman Frank Cash, died in 1994 before he could be charged.
Collins and her fellow victims became symbols of racial violence, styled as martyrs in the struggle for civil rights. In 2013, President Obama awarded each girl the Congressional Gold Medal.
The Collins family appears in the 1997 Spike Lee film 4 Little Girls, a documentary on the bombing and its political significance. In 1998, the Collins family requested that Addie Mae’s body be exhumed and moved to another cemetery. Her body was not in the spot where it was presumed to be. After decades of neglect, the cemetery records were found to be incomplete and the location of the body had been lost.
References:
https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/addie-mae-collins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addie_Mae_Collins