4 Little Girls

The most memorable moment in Spike Lee’s documentary 4 Little Girls (1997) occurs nearly halfway through, as two veterans remember participating in the US Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and ’60s. Lillie Brown of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) recalls being energised by the “freedom songs” of the period, and begins singing her favourite, “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize”: “The only thing that we did wrong / We stayed in the wilderness a day too long / Keep your eyes on the prize / Hold on, my Lord, hold on.” The music continues to play as the film leaves this moment of a charismatic individual in the late 20th century to generate a montage that illustrates the lingering indignities of the Jim Crow era 40 years earlier. The song is a moment of unexpected joy in a film necessarily characterised by horror and trauma. It is also an exemplar of Lee’s method in 4 Little Girls and other major films, situating the personal (and even the idiosyncratic) within the collective, while honouring both.

More immediately, the sequence reveals the pretext of 4 Little Girls. The song was the theme of Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement (1987-1990), PBS’s multi-Emmy award-winning, 14-part documentary series. 4 Little Girls was edited and co-produced by Sam Pollard, who co-wrote and directed two episodes of Eyes. 4 Little Girls also interviews many of the same contributors to Eyes and uses much of the same library footage. Yet the differences between 4 Little Girls and Eyes point to the limitations of the latter, and the reasons why offshoots like 4 Little Girls were necessary.

Eyes uses the PBS documentary template most familiar to international audiences in the work of Ken Burns. The episodes are stately in tone and pace, mixing talking heads with archival footage. The audience is guided by explanatory captions, a linear cause-and-effect script, and the measured, deep tones of a (usually male) narrator. It is a template that has served a multitude of topics from the American West to national parks, the Civil War to Vietnam, baseball to jazz – disparate subjects brought together by being representative of ‘America’. The problem with templates is that anything that does not fit is either distorted to conform or left out altogether.

The story of the ‘4 little girls’ is featured in Eyes at the end of episode four, “No Easy Walk (1961-1963).” This episode follows a frequent pattern in Eyes wherein a narrative of discrete struggle leads to a climactic breakthrough, only to be followed by a setback or failure elsewhere – a ‘rise and fall’ rhythm, or, less charitably, an old-fashioned cliffhanger structure. “No Easy Walk” charts two of the most iconic stages of the Civil Rights movement, the Birmingham campaign in Alabama and the March on Washington. After the jubilation of the March, which brought the movement to international intention, and co-organiser Rev. Ralph Abernathy stating that it was “the greatest day of [his] life,” the episode concludes with the bombing 18 days later of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham (September 1963), which resulted in four deaths and 15 injuries. Over footage of the funerals, the narrator intones, “The murder of these children shook the nonviolent movement to its core. As the people buried their dead, they sang “We Shall Overcome”; but in anger and in rage, many wondered how.”  

By focusing on the headline-grabbing political events, Eyes privileges the ‘big players’ of the struggle – the dynamic activists and reactionary officials. ‘Ordinary’ life and ‘ordinary’ people tend to be invoked merely to demonstrate the conditions that the activists were protesting, rather than as valuable in their own right. This is understandable – even with 14 hours, a TV series can only show so much, especially if the intention is to present and preserve a particular narrative. Nevertheless, it is still shocking – especially with the hindsight of Lee’s rich film – to watch the cursory treatment of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Eyes. The four little girls are not even named. What counts for Eyes is the symbolic fact of their fate and its generative role in the future direction of the Civil Rights movement – and not their specificity as individuals.

Lee rectifies this oversight immediately. 4 Little Girls begins with an emotive montage linking past and present, highlighting tombstones and photographs of the girls, as well as stock images of the Civil Rights struggle, accompanied by Joan Baez singing the protest elegy “Birmingham Sunday”. Baez identifies each victim by name: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson. This opening, besides placing the fate of four ordinary girls at the centre of the 1960s counterculture, demonstrates from the off how 4 Little Girls will differ from Eyes. It will privilege emotion and subjectivity over analysis and apparent objectivity. 

In form at least, it might be difficult to distinguish such a montage from, say, the “Those we have lost” segment at the Oscars. But Lee goes much further. The opening restores the four little girls to history, but it still circumscribes them – as passive victims of others’ actions, as emblems of hopes unfulfilled or a beleaguered race, as, quite simply, dead. One strand of the film attempts to bring the girls back to life, or at least, to honour the lives they did lead. Through interviews with parents, siblings, cousins, friends, neighbours, and teachers, Addie Mae, Denise, Cynthia, and Carole become distinct personalities, with their own senses of humour, community spirit, religious feeling, political conscience, and personal ambition. They are humanised.  

Of course, this is another old trick of popular documentaries – create a sense of identification with the subjects so that their destruction becomes more emotionally devastating and the cause of their destruction more culpable. What distinguishes Lee’s film from such cynicism is the polyphony of voices presented, and the quality of the interviewees. Each speaker impresses their individuality on the film. Denise’s father Chris, for example, is endearingly bumptious, while her mother Maxine undercuts crotchety respectability with dry humour. Though they are filmed separately, the editing creates the impression of a conversation between a fractious but fond old married couple while also evoking the families under pressure in fiction films like Lee’s under-rated Crooklyn (1994). Cynthia’s friend Dr. Freeman Hrabowski III has the gift of narrating a past event with boyish enthusiasm, as if he is living it at that moment. Some interviewees have clearly developed coping mechanisms to deal with their traumas; others remain shellshocked, barely able to testify above a whisper. Howell Raines from the New York Times has the wizened decency of a newspaper editor in a Howard Hawks film, while Reverend Fred Shuttleworth, President of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, and survivor of at least two racist bombings, still exudes the fearless heroism of his Civil Rights days.

The quality of these talking heads owes much to Lee’s skills as an interviewer.  Never intrusive in the manner of Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore, he can occasionally be heard offscreen encouraging a speaker. In the film’s overpowering sequence, the congenial Alpha Robertson, Carole’s mother, struggles to articulate her decades-long battle with anger and hatred over the murder of her daughter. Lee’s gentle joke that he is not an investigative reporter like Mike Wallace or Ed Bradley breaks the tension, and allows Alpha to resolve her thoughts in her own way. It is one of the most touching moments in all Lee’s cinema.

Given the above account, it would be tempting to dismiss 4 Little Girls as well-meaning schmaltz. The sentimentality of the film’s first strand performs a formal as well as ethical function. Its warmth is placed against the cool implacability of history in the second strand, which details the wider context of the Civil Rights struggles in the South, and the forensic ‘true crime’ tone of the third, that outs the killer “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, his accomplices, and ‘respectable’ enablers. Again, the comparison with Eyes is instructive. Eyes tacitly functions as a kind of courtroom drama, soberly using incontrovertible facts and expert testimony to present its evidence for the Civil Rights experience. There is no editorialising, no agitprop, no special pleading, no sarcasm. This is a laudable approach, but it has its limits.  

Take a figure like George Wallace, who exceeds mere facts and testimony. Wallace, long-serving Governor of Alabama and staunch defender of segregation in the South, may be condemned by his own words and actions in the footage used in Eyes (or more directly as an antagonist in Robert Drew’s Direct Cinema classic of 1963, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment), but he remains a human being, a figure created by and situated in history. For the people of Alabama, however, and in the Black American folk memory, Wallace is far more than this. He is a mythical yet concrete embodiment of tyranny and dehumanisation, of attitudes and laws that maimed millions of lives for centuries. How to present Wallace as an ‘idea’ or symbol in a documentary? Lee deploys the grotesque exaggeration of 18th century political cartoons, the dystopian mythopoeia of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), and, above all, the montage techniques used by Sergei Eisenstein to satirise the ruling classes in Stachka (Strike, 1925) and Oktyabr’: Desyat’ dney kotorye potryasli mir (October: Ten Days That Shook the World, 1928). Through editing, cropping, and changes in film stock, Wallace emerges from satanic billows of cigar smoke as at once monstrous and pathetic, grotesque in his croaking self-justification, yet all-powerful in the interests he represented – a Colonel Kurtz in his brightly lit office. This is the man who – on behalf of an entire social and political class – created the poisonous moral atmosphere that allowed the Ku Klux Klan to resurge in the South, to infiltrate the police force, and to delegate the atrocious acts of terrorism of which the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was only one. Even so, Wallace escapes Lee’s grasp, and remains the author of his own awfulness. A year or so before his death, he manages in 4 Little Girls to humiliate and discomfit one more Black person, in this case his helper whom he claims to be his closest friend, and yet at whose touch he visibly recoils.  

Elsewhere, Lee undercuts some white Southern apologists’ claims that Birmingham was once a peaceful place to live with images of segregation, lynching and police violence against Black people. Later images of recent burnings of Black churches demonstrate that the Civil Rights movement did not overcome structural racism or achieve the prize of equality and freedom. As Lee’s entire body of work demonstrates, U.S. racism is not a ‘problem’ to be confronted and resolved, but part of a historical continuum that breaks out with renewed ferocity and with various levels of official complicity. The George Wallaces of today have different names, but the dehumanising misery and destruction they leave behind them remains the same.

4 Little Girls can be seen as a counterweight to Lee’s earlier and most controversial representation of the Civil Rights movement, the ‘Great Man’ biopic Malcolm X (1992). Placed alongside each other, Malcolm X and 4 Little Girls hold in tension Lee’s often fanboy fascination for individuals attempting to control their destinies and rewrite history, and his more politically nuanced understanding of ‘ordinary’ people made unwittingly (and usually unwillingly) extraordinary by circumstances beyond their control. 4 Little Girls is full of Great Men – not least Dr. King and his SCLC colleagues Reverends James Bevel, Wyatt Tee Walker, and Andrew Young, but also celebrities such as Ossie Davis, Walter Cronkite and the since-disgraced Bill Cosby – but only insofar as they can explain the four little girls and those like them, rather than the other way round. It is perhaps this reversal of the usual focus that has seen the film’s reputation grow over the years, from the initial mixed reviews to induction into the Library of Congress’ prestigious National Film Registry in 2017.

4 Little Girls (1997 USA 103 mins)

Prod Co: HBO, 40 Acres & A Mule Prod: Spike Lee, Sam Pollard Dir: Spike Lee Phot: Ellen Kuras Ed: Sam Pollard Mus: Terence Blanchard