Overcome

4 Little Girls (1997)

WHC

The second-happiest surprise in this film about the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, screened on opening night of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas as part of a package of documentaries by Spike Lee and producer Sam Pollard, is how often we laugh. Time doesn't heal all, but it helps focus memories on the living girls, and how they made smiles. Then too, much of the humor comes from veterans of the civil rights movement recalling the racism that can now, the virulence dissipated, be parsed as absurdity. (If you thought Michael Moore eviscerated Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine, wait 'til you see what Spike does to the pathetic shell of George Wallace, a year or so from the grave. To me this sequence was far too painful to be funny, but mine was clearly a minority opinion.)

The happiest surprise in this film is that this iconic quartet of martyrs to the movement is presented as daughters and sisters and friends, never as symbols. If you are a parent, I defy you to listen to these parents, bereft for a third of a century by the time the film was made, and not imagine yourself robbed of one unutterably precious not just senselessly but hatefully, calculatedly, as part of a program to crush you and those who share your skin color. I've read Taylor Branch's excellent 3-volume history of Dr. King's time, but nothing in that made me feel as immediately what being black in Birmingham in 1963 was like as much as the account by Denise McNair's father of having to explain to her why they couldn't eat at a downtown department store lunch counter.