4 Little Girls

4 Little Girls

Little girls went early to church for practice in the choir, and we can visualize them dressed in their Sunday best with their friends in the room that was destroyed by bomb. A picture of these little girls is possible due to Lee’s bringing them back to life somewhat through photographs, old home movies and the memories of their families and friends.

This was not long after I had seen “4 Little Girls” that I heard a report from Charlayne Hunter-Gault on radio. She became the first black woman to desegregate University of Georgia when she was 19 years old in 1961, now an NPR correspondent. That’s what happened to her. Carole Robertson was 14 years old in 1963; her Girl Scout sash was covered with merit badges. We’ll never know what would have happened, because she died that day.

That thought keeps returning: The four little girls never got to grow up. Not only did they lose their lives; they lost how much they could have given us as well. Denise McNair, who died aged 11, however, might just have made it big. In home movies she appears as poised and observant, filled with charisma among other things; she comes across as a poised child who has so much promise ahead of her. Among the many subject of the film there are two parents who stand out clearly Chris and Maxine McNair since they remember one special child.

Chris McNair tells us about one day when he took Denise downtown Birmingham where upon smelling onions frying at a lunch counter there she grew hungry.” My choice not to give my daughter anything away but denying her that sandwich because of racism wasn’t much worse than watching rock break through her skull”, he recollects.” By using archived news footage of the bombing day together with photographs and eyewitness accounts Lee recreates also it within a larger context of civil movements down south sit-ins ‘and the arrests, the marches, the songs and the killings.’

Birmingham was a tough case. Police commissioner Bull Connor is seen directing the resistance to marchers and traveling in an armored vehicle–painted white, of course. Gov. George Wallace makes his famous vow to stand in the schoolhouse door and personally bar any black students from entering. Their resistance was pointless after Sept. 15, 1963 since what came out of that bomb showed all their talk for what it was.

This movie has been on Spike Lee’s mind since 1983 when he came across an article written by Howell Raines in the New York Times magazine about the bombing of the church. “That was before he had made any of his films,” said Chris McNair during our conversation when I asked him if he had ever received a letter from Spike Lee. “He wrote me asking permission back then.”

It is probably better that Lee waited because at least now he is more of a film maker and events have provided for him a denouement in the conviction of Robert Chambliss (“Dynamite Bob”) as bomber. He was, according to Raines who met many, “the most pathological racist I’ve ever encountered”. The other victims were Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins aged fourteen years respectively. In almost unbearable shots we witness these dead young girls’s bodies seen in mortuarys.

Why does Lee show them? Maybe just to try to confront whatever atrocities took place there. To show racism its handiwork . For instance, one scene depicts a bulky white policeman telling an African-American minister immediately after the bombing, “I really didn’t believe they would go this far.” Although it says that he was actually a member of Ku Klux Klan, since using words like ‘they’ in describing this race driven crime indicates his disassociation with others mentioned above without being aware of it himself according to movie makers.

He wants nothing to do with what occurred. So did others. A short time later even Wallace was apologizing for his behavior and trying to rethink his positioning on certain issues.

In this film, there’s one particular episode where the former governor (now old and sick) refers to Eddie Holcey, his black personal aide as his best friend in life.“I couldn’t live without him,” Wallace says calling Holcey over for questioning not minding about how that might affect him emotionally.

“What is that scene there for? That’s connected to the morgue photos somehow,” I feel. The surface of “4 Little Girls” mostly contains sadness and regret, but its depths are filled with anger, which is only natural.

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