MECAWI Film Showing Features "Four Little Girls" on the 1963 Bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham

The Four Little Girls Killed by the Klan Bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire Photo File.

For Immediate Release

Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice
(MECAWI) Film Showing and Discussion

Film: Four Little Girls, 102 minutes
Date: Wednesday, December 6, 2006, 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Location: 5920 Second Avenue at Antoinette,
Near the WSU Campus
Contact: (313) 831-0750
E-mail: admin@mecawi.org
URL: http://www.mecawi.org

MECAWI to Screen "Four Little Girls" Documenting the Bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963 and its Impact on the Civil Right Movement

The passage of Proposal 2 (the ban on affirmative action) on November 7 has highlighted the necessity of intensifying the struggle against racism in Michigan and throughout the United States. The role of youth and the sacrifices made by them during the 1960s, helped to secure the eradication of legalized segregation and the right to vote for African-Americans.

In Four Little Girls, Spike Lee creates portraits of the four young victims of the racially motivated Birmingham church bombing in 1963 by talking to their families, friends, neighbors and teachers. The film examines the climate of segregation and state-sanctioned violence that led to this particular bombing, and the civil rights activism that both preceded and followed it. One theme that emerges strongly throughout the film is the role of young people as civil rights activists in Birmingham, where students would skip school, sometimes with tacit permission of their parents or teachers, sometimes not, so they could demonstrate in the streets.

Directed by Spike Lee; director of photography, Ellen Kuras; edited by Sam Pollard; music by Terence Blanchard; produced by Mr. Lee and Mr. Pollard; released by HBO and 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks.

WITH: Chris McNair, Maxine McNair, Bill Baxley, Alpha Robertson, Wamo Reed Robertson, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Shirley Wesley King, Wyatt Tee Walker, George Wallace, Arthur Hanes Jr., Bill Cosby and Howell Raines.

Admission to this event is free and open to the general public.
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Review From the NYT
July 9, 1997, Wednesday

Still Reeling From the Day Death Came to Birmingham

By JANET MASLIN

''Four Little Girls'' is Spike Lee's immensely dignified and moving reassessment of a terrorist crime. This watershed moment in the history of the civil rights movement, the bombing on Sept. 15, 1963, of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., left four young Sunday school students dead (the oldest were 14) and a nation galvanized by outrage and shame. Thirty-four years later, Mr. Lee and the many witnesses he interviews are able to see both the tragedy and the turning point in this event.

''This was the awakening,'' says Walter Cronkite, speaking of how the bombing shocked white America as he is interviewed in Mr. Lee's first feature-length documentary, a thoughtful, graceful, quietly devastating account. It opens today at the Film Forum in order to qualify for the Academy Award consideration that it well deserves. ''Four Little Girls'' will be shown later this year on HBO.

''Four Little Girls'' is Spike Lee's immensely dignified and moving reassessment of a terrorist crime. This watershed moment in the history of the civil rights movement, the bombing on Sept. 15, 1963, of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., left four young Sunday school students dead (the oldest were 14) and a nation galvanized by outrage and shame. Thirty-four years later, Mr. Lee and the many witnesses he interviews are able to see both the tragedy and the turning point in this event.

''This was the awakening,'' says Walter Cronkite, speaking of how the bombing shocked white America as he is interviewed in Mr. Lee's first feature-length documentary, a thoughtful, graceful, quietly devastating account. It opens today at the Film Forum in order to qualify for the Academy Award consideration that it well deserves. ''Four Little Girls'' will be shown later this year on HBO.

As what will surely be the only Spike Lee film ever to begin with a Joan Baez record (''Birmingham Sunday,'' Richard Farina's mournful ballad about the crime), ''Four Little Girls'' starts off on an intimate note. Old photos, fond memories, childhood anecdotes are among the personal touches that help summon Carol Denise McNair, 11, and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Rosamond Robertson, all 14. One mother even displays her daughter's Girl Scout sash, adorned with merit badges. Nothing in the scouting credo could have helped this young girl prepare for what fate had in store.

While their gentle, well-spoken friends and relatives offer thoughts about the promising lives of these schoolgirls, Mr. Lee eloquently interweaves signs of the times. An elderly neighbor recalls what it was like to steer a thirsty black child away from a whites-only water fountain; Mr. Lee juxtaposes this with a remark by Arthur Hanes Jr., a white lawyer for the convicted bomber, Robert (Dynamite Bob) Chambliss, to the effect that Birmingham was a fine place to live.

And Denise McNair's father, one of the film's most affecting witnesses by virtue of his brave restraint, remembers the day Denise passed the segregated lunch counter at Kress's store and announced that the smell of frying onions made her hungry. ''I guess that was the night I made up my mind to tell her that she couldn't have that sandwich because she was black,'' Mr. McNair says simply. Throughout his interview here he maintains his proud composure, even when describing the terrible business of identifying the body of Denise with a chunk of concrete in her skull.

Mr. Lee, whose lean, straightforward documentary style loses none of his usual clarity and fire (the film has been exceptionally well shot by Ellen Kuras), summons a powerful sense of Birmingham's past and a galvanizing sense of how this bombing would change its future. The full monstrousness of racist history is encapsulated in scenes of former Gov. George C. Wallace. Mr. Wallace is seen sitting at his desk and slurring his words so badly he needs subtitles as he describes a black aide, Eddie Holcey, as his best friend. ''Couldn't live without him,'' Mr. Wallace says of Mr. Holcey, who looks helplessly mortified when the ex-Governor showily clasps his hand.

Among others interviewed in this strong and haunting film are Bill Cosby, who imagines what the girls' future might have been. and the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, who describes the larger role of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in making Birmingham so central to their struggle. Howell Raines, whose 1983 article on the Chambliss trial in the The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Lee says, inspired him to make the film, affords Mr. Chambliss the considerable distinction of calling him ''the most pathological racist I've ever encountered.'' Verbal accounts here of the Chambliss trial have more power than many a fictionalized courtroom drama.

''Four Little Girls'' is most remarkable, though, in making the girls unforgettable and eliciting the long-buried emotions of those who loved them. Addie Mae Collins's soft-spoken sister tells of panic attacks she experienced after the bombing, shaken by the profound fear that not even church was safe anymore. The McNairs summon their hopes for a sunny future from the days before Denise was even born. And Carole Robertson's mother tells Mr. Lee that she thinks she has finally put her anger behind her. Off-camera, he questions this a bit, saying ''I'm not trying to be Mike Wallace, now.''

''Or Ed Bradley,'' Mrs. Robertson gently corrects him. Small points in ''Four Little Girls'' have a way of illuminating the larger history Mr. Lee explores here.