The film “Four Little Girls” by Spike Lee gives those people who were most intimately connected with the four little girls who were killed by a dynamite explosion in a Baptist church in 1963 a chance to share their perspectives on the events that led up to the loss. Most of these people were the little girls’ family members, such as their parents and siblings, but school friends were also interviewed. Even after all this time, many of the people who were interviewed still had a difficult time controlling their emotions from time to time in trying to convey to the audience a sense of who these little girls were. The film isn’t exactly a history lesson, but it isn’t exactly not one either as it attempts to reveal the personalities of the girls leading up to the morning of the bombing and then rides the ripples of pain that continue to be felt in the community over their loss as it reveals what happened in the days after the bombing. It ends by exploring the ways in which their deaths impacted the Civil Rights Movement and opened the eyes of the white people in the North and the South.
It is hard to look back in history deeply enough to really understand just how much racial prejudice can enable you to blind yourself to the realities occurring all around you. It was so surprising to me to hear Bull Connor talk about how he considered himself to be a friend to the black people. The blatant discrimination of segregation was actually how Bull thought things should have been and that things really were equal between the races, or as equal as they could be. There was the section where he talked about how he provided books once for the black children to keep them going to school. He didn’t talk about addressing the issues that made black families so poor that they couldn’t afford schoolbooks and he kept calling out to a black man that he had travel with him to point out how this man was his best friend. The problem I had with this is that the black man did not seem like he was a best friend. He seemed more like a trophy. He would come in view of the camera when he was called, stand just behind Bull Connor and then drift out of the scene as quickly as Bull forgot about him, which was pretty quick.
The extreme racism of the South isn’t just expressed through the words of the people in the film, but are also seen in the pictures and film footage of the time. Discrimination is made present in the images that are shown of the Whites and Colored water fountains and restroom signs that are shown while the effects of this type of racism are discussed by Denise’s dad when he talks about his daughter’s reaction when she finally had to be told about the way life really was in the South. My own prejudice made me surprised at how nice the houses looked in the video. I had expected something like the slave shacks that are drawn into old picture books, but the houses that were shown in the film seemed decent enough. They had lawns, patios and covered parking areas. These are a lot nicer than many of the inner city apartment complexes I’ve seen. It is very, very sad that these little girls had to die to make the point and get the rest of the nation paying attention. I hope people will wake up to the problems that discrimination, racism and prejudice are still causing today without needing a repeat of this kind of tragedy first.