February 20, 1998| Time is a thief that robs us of the past. As years go by, memories fade, outrage cools and witnesses are forever silenced. Which is all the more reason to be grateful for Spike Lee’s Oscar-nominated documentary Four Little Girls, a vividly detailed and profoundly moving account of a horrendous tragedy that proved to be a watershed moment in the history of the American civil rights movement. Scheduled to air Feb. 23, 26 and 28 on HBO after a limited theatrical release, this is a film that brings history to life and preserves it for posterity.
On the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, a bomb exploded in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. This was a hate crime, impure and simple, designed by militant racists to intimidate black churchgoers who were active in Birmingham’s integrationist movement. But instead of short-circuiting the civil-rights protests, this cowardly act of terrorism had a galvanizing effect, largely because the explosion claimed four young victims: Carol Denise McNair, 11, and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Rosamond Robertson, all 14.
As veteran newscaster Walter Cronkite recalls: “At that moment that bomb went off, and those four little girls were blasted and buried in the debris of the church, America understood the real nature of the hate that was preventing integration, particularly in the South, but also throughout America. This was the awakening.”
Using old photos, personal accounts, news footage and historical commentaries, Lee allows us to appreciate each of the murdered little girls as individuals. As we view these children through the eyes of those who knew and loved them, we gain a strong sense of what kind of adults they might have grown up to be. And we understand how each was exposed early on to degradations of segregation.
Chris McNair recalls more in sadness than anger the day he and his daughter passed a lunch counter in a downtown Birmingham department store. The smell of frying onions made Denise hungry. But she couldn’t eat there, of course, because of the whites-only policy. “That was the night,” McNair says, “that I made up my mind that I guess I had to tell her that she couldn’t have that sandwich because she was black.” Later in Four Little Girls, McNair describes in the same sorrowful tone how he identified the bomb-blasted body of his precious child.
Don’t misunderstand: Four Little Girls is much, much more than a true-crime story. Lee takes great pains to place the church bombing in a sharply-defined historical context. In 1963, we are told by the defense attorney of the racist convicted of the terrorist attack, Birmingham was “a wonderful place to live and raise a family.” But his glib words are undercut by photographic evidence and first-person descriptions of vicious assaults on black folks who dared to vote, or seek equality, or simply eat in segregated restaurants. Repeatedly, we are confronted with the snarling face of Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, an almost ludicrously obvious villain whose gleeful evil would be deemed too overstated if he were to appear in dramatic feature.
Four Little Girls will make you rage. And it will make you weep. For that, too, we should be grateful to Spike Lee.
