The lone survivor of a 1963 Alabama church bombing that killed four black girls said Wednesday she wants millions in compensation for her injuries and won’t accept a top congressional award proposed to honor the victims.

Sarah Collins Rudolph, in an interview with The Associated Press, said she feels forgotten 50 years after the blast shocked the nation. Rudolph lost an eye in the Sept. 16, 1963 bombing at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and says she never got restitution.

“We haven’t received anything, and I lost an eye,” said Rudolph, who lives north of Birmingham. “They just want to throw a medal at us.”

Congress is considering whether to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the four girls who died: 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, and 11-year-old Denise McNair. Addie Mae was the sister of Rudolph, who was 12 at the time and was in a downstairs washroom with the four girls when the blast occurred. At least two dozen others were injured.

The brother of Cynthia Wesley said he isn’t interested in the award either and wants compensation, partly because history didn’t even record his sister’s name correctly.

The church bombing shocked the nation and was a galvanizing moment in the civil rights movement.

The five girls were preparing for Sunday services in the washroom near the wall where the bomb was planted outside.

It was more than a decade before any successful prosecutions were brought in the case.

Juries convicted three Ku Klux Klansmen in the bombing years later, and one suspected accomplice died without ever having been charged; one of the four is still in prison and the others are dead.

But Rudolph said she still hasn’t gotten justice like other crime victims who receive restitution payments.

“My sister was killed and I lost my eye. Why should I be any different?” said Rudolph, who says she still suffers from painful memories, physical scars and posttraumatic stress syndrome.

“It’s a smoke screen to shut us up and make us go away so we’ll never be heard from again,” Morris told AP.

Stephanie Engle, an activist who is publicizing the families’ push for compensation, said victims of the bombing deserve reparation just like Japanese Americans who received payments through a $1.6 billion program decades after being held in internment camps during World War II.

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