4 Little Girls (DVD)

BRAVO SPIKE LEE!The friends and family of the litte girls speak out to, put a face & personality to the 4 little girls that lost their innocent lives in that church that TRAGIC DAY! So often in documenteries during the time of the civil rights movement you hear this story "BRIEFLY". 4 little girls went to Sunday School...and suddenly the church is bombed. But this film gives the viewer a closer look at who these 4 little girls were, their parents, & siblings & neighborhood friends share memories of these young ladies with the viewer. And that is the LIGHT in this film.The DARK side to this film is when you learn a BOMB has went off inside the church. You learn that the girls was in the basement of the church or close to where this bomb goes off at. And when the images, of those gilrs bodies later flash across that TV screen it paints the UGLY FACE of just how EVIL the SOUTHERN WHITE PEOPLE (& KKK) were during this time particular time period. It emotionally UPSETS you to see the damage to these girls bodies after that bombing.The worse part about most of the cases in the south where civil rights activists or innocent people and children were killed was that none of these MURDERERS were brought to JUSTICE (JAILED for MURDER) because the "all WHITE" Jury always found them "NOT GUILTY", or would dismiss all the charges. The judges were white, the jury was always "all white". The police department was always all "WHITE". Now fast foward to more recent times or say the 1990's, most of these same EVIL, KKK white people are now DEAD or EXTREMEMLY OLD. But in some cases they were re trialed (anyway) & sentenced these same murderers to a sentence they should have been sentenced to back when they commited these terrible crimes in the 50's & 60's. But they are so old that they'd DIE shortly after the new sentence. All those years they were FREE & should have been locked up or even sentenced to the electric chair.What gives any person the RIGHT to kill anybody? Just shoot them like dogs in the street, or hang them from trees, or burn/bomb their houses & churches- Simply because they just want to be treated equally like the "human beings" they are? Its just so SAD & SICK.

Spike Lee's 4 Little Girls was briefly released to theaters in 1997 to qualify for Oscar contention as Best Documentary. It was first broadcast nationwide on Home Box Office. It is a remarkably clear-eyed telling of an incendiary tale--how four young black girls, ages 11 to 14, were killed in a 1963 bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.I hesitate to compare 4 Little Girls to Schindler's List, and yet it has that same quality of being a restrained, dignified recounting of an emotional incident. Spike Lee had been wanting to tell this story since before he became a noted filmmaker, and Lee brings all of his remarkable talents to bear. The movie is not flashy, just quietly gripping.Lee frames the incident within the bigger picture of the Southern civil rights movement, particularly as it took place within an inflamed Birmingham. We see the town's police commissioner, Bull Connor--described by one interviewee as "the dark spirit of Birmingham"--keeping order in town while driving a tank painted white, an image that is sure to bring gasps to those who aren't familiar with the full story (which, I humbly admit, included me). And we see a repentant Gov. George Wallace, dragging a reluctant black colleague on camera so that Wallace can introduce him as "my best friend in the world." (Notably, the "friend" looks quite unconvinced.)It is that Wallace footage that might seem the most showy in a documentary otherwise bereft of editorializing. But it seems right to include the footage after seeing how the segregationist tactics of Wallace and others led indirectly to the deaths of Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley. Using little more than home movies and interviews with surviving family members, Lee brings the dead girls back to life and shows us that, when racial stereotypes are accepted and even honored, individual tragedies are the result.Mostly, the story is told through simple, heartbreaking facts. Chris McNair tells us of the day he had to explain to his daughter Denise how she was taken by the aroma of a cooking hamburger at a lunch counter but could not eat there because she was black. And the film comes full circle by pointing out the inexplicable resurgence of black church bombings in the 1990's.Most of the victims' relatives, understandably, become quite emotional on-camera. It can't have been easy to reopen these old wounds, but 4 Little Girls makes you grateful that they endured their pain to do it. I only wish the movie had been up for Best Picture, as it is worth a dozen L.A. Confidential's.4 Little Girls is rated TV-14 for violence, brief nudity, and racial epithets.

I was deeply grieved and saddened over the deaths of these innocent children, being born into a world at that time, to suffer such an act of barbaric behavior. I was also very angered by the racism that dominated the American landscape especially in the south and in that same town my mother came from. where she experienced the same cruelty that these families have faced.If I was older at the time, and was a highly skilled militarily trained mercenary assassin. Trained in the field of war fare, weapons, ammunition and counter terrorism. I would have became a vigilante. I would of made it my aim in life to go visit this town, and do away with Bob Chambliss very quickly, and police commissioner Bull Conner and dispose of theirremains. They would be erased from this world and I would put the fear of God in them.I would see to it, that no would be able to find them or me and systematically kill off these racist and Klansman, one by one until there was no more left of them and would stop at nothing to end the racist behavior that had taken place in Alabama and throughout the south. I truly hate racism with a passion.

A very interesting story about the four little girls, who were killed by bombing during a youth worship into the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Montgommery Alabama. It exposed a real struggle between people of different races at time that M.L. King started his campaign for reaching Civil Rights to every American. This film report shows us all the aspects where America had social problems with herself: the Vietnam War into the background and the increasing protest against in the world, and the Kennedy affair. A good production!

Was a Doclenentry in AmericaGood DVD. True story well liked it

Must see, must see- everyone.

After the film ‘Selma’ was made, a project raised the funds to ensure a copy of the film was given to every school in the USA. This brilliant documentary should be right alongside it. The testimony is undeniable and profoundly moving. Spike Lee enables the people who lived through this to put their truth on the record. We all need to hear them.

I do not know why I keep putting myself through this, watching these movies are so hurtful, These people are making me sick to see how they could just do what they do and cant see the wrong in their actions... My question is how could they look themselves in the mirror and not want to slice their own throat.... Yes I said it... People are just too sick