ARTS-ENTERTAINMENT – 2

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jul 22 1997 (IPS) - History generally fails to record what happens to ordinary people whose lives are transformed by momentous events. A new documentary film about the families and friends of four young girls killed in the bombing of a church in Alabama, however, achieves the rare victory of focusing on the everyday lives of the people who were most affected by the crime.

Film-maker Spike Lee, in his first documentary, ‘4 Little Girls,’ makes an effort to put the spotlight on some of the people caught up in the U.S. civil rights struggle and he wisely avoids simply repeating news clips of events in the 1960s.

Instead, Lee’s civil rights heroes are common people – the parents of 11-year-old Denise McNair, who had to identify their daughter’s corpse after the 1963 bombing blasted a chunk of concrete into her skull; or the mother of 14-year-old Carole Robertson, who quietly speaks of her anger since the death of her child.

The two other victims were Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley and all the people portayed in the movie are eloquent in their gentility and displaying great dignity as they discuss how, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was hard to be black in Birmingham, a racially- divided Alabaman town racked by bitter labour disputes.

For Christopher McNair, Denise’s father, the most agoniing moment was to explain to his daughter why he couldn’t buy a sandwich for her in a “white-only” shop – a concession, he says, which shattered her. For other parents, it was the moment when they had to pull their children away from “white” drinking fountains – even when no-one else was there.

A white judge cheerfully explains to Lee that Birmingham always was “a wonderful place to raise a family,” but the black writer- director juxtaposes those words against photos of Ku Klux Klan rallies and lynchings of black men – one of whose “crimes” was exercising his right to vote.

Similarly, when former Alabama Governor George Wallace, famous for his platform of strict segregation of the races, talks to Lee about how he respects black people, the director’s eye is unsparing. Not only does the film show the aged Wallace’s feeble efforts to shake hands with a black aide and call him “my best friend,” it captures the look of utter embarrassment on the black man’s face as he withdraws into the shadows behind the ex- governor.

Lee describes his film as one with a clear story of “good versus evil,” and the narrative bears that claim out without oversimplifying the racial dynamics at work. Some honourable whites, like New York Times editor Howell Raines, are on hand to talk about the bizarre nature of Birmingham racism.

But the film also shows a plethora of unforgettable villains: Wallace, physically barring black children from jpoining whites entering school; former Birmingham police chief Eugene ‘Bull’ Conner, turning hoses and ferocious dogs loose on black protestors and ‘Dynamite Bob’ Chambliss, the grinning, cocky man finally convicted of the bombing.

Arrayed against such foes, Lee’s black protagonists are victorious by keeping their good humour and grace. One veteran activist simply chuckles at his memories of Conner’s lunacy. The Rev Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the main civil-rights leaders in Birmingham, recalls how he told one white police officer after his house was bombed that his struggle would go on until he died.

Soon, the black leaders resorted to a variety of tactics to end Birmingham’s divide, from bringing in the Rev Martin Luther King Jnr – seen here calling the city “the centre of hard-core segregation” – to allowing children to march in their protests. The Rev James Bevel describes how startling it was when the children first began to march; but the point is made even more emphatically by one man who reminisces, that when he was arrested as a boy marcher, he could go up to his parents and say, “Now I’m a man.”

Ultimately, black efforts to desegregate Birmingham prompted the most of the town’s leaders to encourage a crackdown. Behind a Bull Conner, there always are the “respectable” town elders, interviewees muse.

Ultimately, that backlash led to the bombing of the major black church in Birmingham , just as the four girls of the film’s title were going to Sunday school.

Those girls, as the title itself acknowledges, became a symbol of the racial divisions in the United States: as former TV anchorman Walter Cronkite argues, white America didn’t comprehend the depth of racial hostility until the bombing. The film displays how widely the girls’ story penetrated the culture of the time: Joan Baez is singing her own song about each of the murdered girls as the film begins while later, John Coltrane mournfully plays his saxophone in his own tribute ‘Alabama.’

The four who died were not mere symbols, Lee’s film argues: they were girls who played jokes; who would sit in the back of cinemas to hurl ice at the whites in the front and who dressed up their dolls in elaborate styles. The film makes one thing very clear: the only thing accomplished by the terrorist act was to cause pain and loss for ordinary people.

It is those people, Lee shows, that are worth more than a glancing reference in history.

The Birmingham bombing case continues to haunt not only the families harmed by it, but the town itself. Just this month, one day before the release of Lee’s film, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced it was re-opening its case, citing evidence indicating that Chambliss was not the only one involved in the bombing.

In fact, the film recounts Chambliss’s assertion that three of his friends in the local Ku Klux Klan participated in the attack. The FBI has denied that the timing of its new investigation with Lee’s film was anything more than a coincidence – but, in any case, the movie has itself become an example of how history moves forward even as people try to capture and document it.

‘4 Little Girls’ was produced by Home Box Office, and will be televised on the HBO cable channel in early 1998; it is playing on limited summer release in cinemas throughout the United States.