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4 Little Girls
I Netflixed Spike Lee's documentary 4 Little Girls; MAN. It's not manipulative and there's not a strong POV in it; the camera just tells the stories. There are extensive interviews, mainly with the remaining family members, but with other commentators as well, including Walter Cronkite and Bill Cosby. And George Wallace. Wallace is an interesting character, one of those byzantinely complicated Southerners regarding race relations. Like Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, in his personal life, was racist, called his chauffeur "boy" and expressed other racist sentiments. But politically this man pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964--at the cost of his own party's hegemony. (No one knows for sure whether Johnson said "we have lost the South for a generation" (after Reconstruction, the South was all-Democratic)--but you know a politician as savvy as Johnson recognized that reality.) He was able to transcend his own personal racism and be the rarest of leaders, someone who appeals to the better side of people. Sometimes, in fatalistic mood, I think Kennedy had to die in order to make Civil Rights happen. If he'd lived the administration wouldn't have had that emotional leverage, that nation united in grief, to push it through.
At any rate Wallace was another one of those torturously complicated racist Southerners. (It's frequently like that down there--Southern racism is very different from Northern racism because even back then, blacks interacted much more with whites than they did up North.) Wallace was THE arch-symbol of segregation--in his inaugural address as Governor of Alabama, he famously declared "segregation now, segregation tomorruh, and segregation forevuh!" And yet later in his life, during his last term as Governor, he renounced his racist beliefs, apologized o civil rights leaders and acted on that--appointed blacks in record numbers. Lee's documentary seems not to take that change of views seriously--it has an odd couple of interview snippets with Wallace where it uses subtitles for his speech (I dunno, I understood fine what he was saying, although he did have a strong accent--I guess I see that as a tactic to undermine what he was saying) and in general films the Wallace segments differently (no closeups, for one thing). But I can understand why someone might not accept Wallace's conversion; he acted pretty badly in the '60s. He had a lot to answer for.
Anyway, the documentary is very strong, just breaks your heart. One of those pieces that just makes you hate people, sad to say. Birmingham was some kind of dark place on the planet then--the background on the city, "Bombingham," is interesting because I have a lot of family there, my grandfather was from Birmingham. A very dark place in the '60s that attracted a lot of dark, angry energy.
I love this graphic for the DVD. Although that's some awfully Catholic iconography for a Baptist church!
At one point in the documentary, two of the girls' sisters were talking about the last time they'd seen their sisters, or spoken to them, and the music was playing this one sustained string note. Tension. As if--their fate was nigh. When we look back at events, especially those that are iconic, important turning points like this, we tend to accept them as already having happened, a fait accompli. Fate. We know it's already happened, we know the ending of the story and it's hard to watch the narrative without that foreknowledge. Was this their fate? Was Ate looking over the 16th Street Baptist Church, was it meant to happen? Or was it a series of choices made by the racist filth who planted the bomb, and the leadership of the city and the South (like Wallace and Bull Connor--God, what an uptight, angry, hateful creature he was) who, deliberately or not, encouraged this kind of action, in conjunction with the random choices made by the girls and their family, and the church, that all aligned to place these girls in that basement at 10:22 that morning?
And the choir kept singing of freedom...
At any rate Wallace was another one of those torturously complicated racist Southerners. (It's frequently like that down there--Southern racism is very different from Northern racism because even back then, blacks interacted much more with whites than they did up North.) Wallace was THE arch-symbol of segregation--in his inaugural address as Governor of Alabama, he famously declared "segregation now, segregation tomorruh, and segregation forevuh!" And yet later in his life, during his last term as Governor, he renounced his racist beliefs, apologized o civil rights leaders and acted on that--appointed blacks in record numbers. Lee's documentary seems not to take that change of views seriously--it has an odd couple of interview snippets with Wallace where it uses subtitles for his speech (I dunno, I understood fine what he was saying, although he did have a strong accent--I guess I see that as a tactic to undermine what he was saying) and in general films the Wallace segments differently (no closeups, for one thing). But I can understand why someone might not accept Wallace's conversion; he acted pretty badly in the '60s. He had a lot to answer for.
Anyway, the documentary is very strong, just breaks your heart. One of those pieces that just makes you hate people, sad to say. Birmingham was some kind of dark place on the planet then--the background on the city, "Bombingham," is interesting because I have a lot of family there, my grandfather was from Birmingham. A very dark place in the '60s that attracted a lot of dark, angry energy.
I love this graphic for the DVD. Although that's some awfully Catholic iconography for a Baptist church!
At one point in the documentary, two of the girls' sisters were talking about the last time they'd seen their sisters, or spoken to them, and the music was playing this one sustained string note. Tension. As if--their fate was nigh. When we look back at events, especially those that are iconic, important turning points like this, we tend to accept them as already having happened, a fait accompli. Fate. We know it's already happened, we know the ending of the story and it's hard to watch the narrative without that foreknowledge. Was this their fate? Was Ate looking over the 16th Street Baptist Church, was it meant to happen? Or was it a series of choices made by the racist filth who planted the bomb, and the leadership of the city and the South (like Wallace and Bull Connor--God, what an uptight, angry, hateful creature he was) who, deliberately or not, encouraged this kind of action, in conjunction with the random choices made by the girls and their family, and the church, that all aligned to place these girls in that basement at 10:22 that morning?
And the choir kept singing of freedom...