BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) – Sarah Collins Rudolph thought she’d never see what happened in her hometown: Prompted by protests, the city removed a 115-year-old Confederate monument near where her sister and three other black girls died in a racist church bombing in 1963.
A wave of Confederate memorial removals that began after a white supremacist killed nine black people at a Bible study in a church in South Carolina in 2015 is again rolling, with more relics of the Old South being removed from public view after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota.
In Birmingham, where Rudolph lives, the graffiti-covered, pocked base of a massive Confederate monument was all that remained Tuesday after crews dismantled the towering obelisk and trucked it away in pieces overnight. Other symbols came down elsewhere, leaving an empty pedestal in Virginia and a bare flagpole in Florida.
Rudolph, whose sister Addie Mae Collins died in the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church, had to see the sight for herself. She lowered a protective face mask to take in the absence of an edifice she long considered a symbol of oppression.
“I’m glad it’s been removed because it has been so long, and we know that it’s a hate monument,” said Rudolph, 69. “It didn’t represent the blacks. It just represented the hard times back there a long time ago.”