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4 Little Girls Summary The film 4 Little Girls is the story of the 1963 bombing that took place in Birmingham, Alabama at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The film begins with footage that flashes between images of Black children, protests, and police violence towards Black people and film of the four headstones that belong to the young girls who were killed in the bombing, Denise, Carole, Addie Mae, and Cynthia (Lee 00:01). The audience gets a description of Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s and 60s from two difference perspectives, one from Arthur Hanes Jr. and the other from Black family members of the four girls who were killed. While Arthur claims that Birmingham, a bustling steel town, was a great place to live in the 50s, his audio is juxtaposed with footage of rampant KKK violence and is followed by Denise’s aunt blatantly stating that Birmingham was an awful place for Black children to grow up due to intense Jim Crow segregation (Lee 00:08). The audience gets an intimate description of what raising a child in the Jim Crow South was like, a perspective that is not discussed enough, I think. Chris, Denise’s dad, explains how deeply it hurt him to have to tell Denise she could not use certain water fountains or get food from specific places just because she was Black (Lee 00:11). According to Reverend Wyatt Walker, Birmingham during the late 1940s and 1950s experienced many bombings; there was even an area referred to as “Dynamite Hill” because it was an area where many Black people settled, and white people would constantly drive by and throw explosives onto people’s properties (Lee 00:14). Birmingham was extremely resistant to segregation, with mayor George Wallace leading political anti-segregation efforts while Eugene “Bull” Connors, the police commissioner, kept Black people feeling insecure by inciting intense violence against them (Lee 00:29). Birmingham was the last place a Black person wanted to be in 1963, but Black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth continued to fight back against segregation despite the dangers (Lee 00:26). The introduction of James Bevel provides the audience with some background for a possible motive for the perpetrator(s) of the bombing of Sixteenth Street Church (besides blatant racism and white supremacy) because he was in charge of recruiting younger children to become involved in the marches and protests against segregation (Lee 00:44). Despite the controversy over kids as young as Jr. High becoming involved in the protests, children joined in large numbers (Lee 00:45). After the bombing occurred at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, James Bevel stated that the bombers were getting direct revenge on the children who were involved

with the protests and marches. Black adults were so infuriated and were staunch in the opinion that they could not let these white bombers get away with killing their children (Lee 01:06). It was this bombing that began the Selma movement to get the right to vote for Black Americans so that they could protect their own children (Lee 01:09). In addition, Black leaders explained in their interviews that the bombing was the event that allowed White Americans to truly understand the depths of the hate in the South that was preventing integration and convinced them why there needed to be people like Martin Luther King Jr. (Lee 01:20). Fourteen years after the bombing occurred, in 1977, Robert Chambliss, a former KKK member who sported the nickname Dynamite Bob, was arrested for the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Church. Ultimately, Chris McNair, Denise’s father, and Chamliss’s niece were the reason that Chambliss was ultimately indited for four counts of murder (Lee 01:30). Chambliss was responsible for nearly all of the bombings in Birmingham that happened in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, yet it took him killing four young girls to finally get arrested and charged as guilty. 4 Little Girls depicts how it often takes acts of extreme violence that result in intense tragedy for Black people to get the rights they deserve as citizens in the U.S. In addition, it provides an intimate look at the families of those martyrs and how detrimental psychological white violence is so the entire Black community in America....