4 Little Girls

Spike Lee filmed the HBO documentary 4 Little Girls thirty-four years after the event that it chronicles—the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four young girls getting ready for Sunday morning church service died. Their names were Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins. They ranged from eleven to fifteen years in age. The film is basically a series of interviews with members of the families of the girls, leaders of the local and southern Civil Rights movement, and white leaders of the town, including the attorney who defended the accused bomber Robert Edward Chambliss in the 1974 trial and the district attorney, Bill Baxley, who successfully prosecuted him in 1977. 4 Little Girls presents the events in chronological order. It first describes the girls themselves, mainly through the words and memories of their parents and close relatives. It presents a general overview of the racial environment in Birmingham in the 1950s and early 1960s and the development of the local civil rights movement, whose activities centered in the bombed church. The film’s focus gradually widens, but it never wavers from the primary subject of the girls.

Lee pursues the telling o this story in a highly objective manner. He interviews one subject after another, often filming them at close range, so that their faces fill the screen as they talk. Their expressions and tones of voice, the glistening tears that often gather in the family members’ eyes, are effective in conveying the emotions and the grief that more than three decades later continue to well up. Although clearly there are historical and political dimensions to the bombing of the church, dimensions that link the event to the larger context of the civil rights movement in the South and the rest of the United States, Lee does not make this context the focus of the film. Instead he focuses on the family members, the surviving parents, the brothers and sisters, the friends, who knew the dead girls and grieved most deeply for them. As a result 4 Little Girls is above all about a personal and private tragedy that took on wider significance because of the time and place in which it occurred.

The style and method of Four Little Girls is similar to that of When the Levees Break: A Tragedy in Four Acts, Lee's 2006 HBO documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its impact on New Orleans residents.

Lee’s artful editing, his deft use of a subtle and sometimes hardly apparent musical score, his willingness to let people talk, his careful selection of photographs, newsreel footage, and interview subjects enable him to create a fascinating and emotionally powerful documentary that brings the history alive by never allowing polemic, propaganda, or political agendas to overwhelm the personal and private dimensions of the story. There are a few moments of awkwardness in the film, the main ones being scenes in which an elderly and frail George Wallace attempts to prove his progressive racial views by arguing that he provided free school books for poor black children and that his best friend, Ed, is a black man. Ed, who was apparently a hired companion for the frail Wallace, is summoned on camera twice by Wallace, and the result is embarrassing both for Wallace (who is incapable of seeming anything other than foolish) and for the film. Lee apparently wants to present Wallace both as one of the fundamental forces behind the racist environment that led to the church bombing and also as an aging relic of an old dispensation soon to pass from the scene. The scene seems to take advantage of Wallace's age and frailty, and it should have been omitted or at least significantly abridged. It is similar to Michael Moore’s similarly exploitative interview with a slightly addled Charleton Heston in the film Bowling for Columbine (2002).

Other scenes are more artful, and as a whole the film is skillfully and artfully made. It is far more artful and effective than any film Michael Moore ever made.

The film illustrates the importance of the family and the church as the sustaining center of African American life in Birmingham, as the heart of the civil rights movement, and therefore as the logical target of the bombers. Lee devotes significant time to interviews with the mothers of the dead girls, and with the father of Denise McNair, and these scenes drive home the sad and painful impact of the murders. Mr. McNair narrates an especially poignant scene in which he remembers having to explain to his daughter during the 1950s why she cannot eat at the lunch counter of a segregated Birmingham department store. The eyes of the mothers who still grieve over their daughters, dead more than thirty years, say as much as any number of other scenes in the film.

Contrasted against the family members are the religious and movement leaders—Fred Shuttlesworth, Andrew Young, Martin Luther King—whose decisions inadvertently pulled the girls and their families into martyrdom and history. Lee is careful not to pass judgment in an overt fashion. Often the words of the people he interviews accomplish this. And of course images, photographs, film clips that Lee places on screen while interviewees talk do this too. When the attorney for the bomber talks about how Birmingham in the 1950s was a nice place to live, Lee projects images of lynched black men and of Klansmen on the screen to suggest a different story.

Above and beyond being a film about victims of a tragic incident from the civil rights movement, this film is about the intersection of private lives with a regional and national history. It is about how all of us participate in the making of history and how, sometimes, we pay for participation with our lives, or with the lives of those closest to us.

Is the title of the film a play on the title of the surrealistic play by Picasso, Four Little Girls, written during the 1940s? This is the kind of allusion that Lee would make.