Quatro Meninas

I watched this documentary yesterday afternoon. I remember learning about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing (its importance in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s) but I never saw how the effects on the people whose lives were permanently altered and not just from reaping the benefits like we do today. This documentary opened showed this viewpoint.

It brought tears to my eyes to listen and see the relatives of those four girls who were killed. Unless you have a blind eye, a deaf ear, and a hard-a** heart, it is impossible to not be moved when you see these girls' sisters and mothers describe that Sunday morning when Addie, Denise, Maxine, and Carole were killed. I could see the hurt in the mothers' eyes and hear pain in their voices when talking about their babies.

I highly recommend watching this documentary. Spike Lee did an outstanding job.

Lee's film does an excellent job of bringing the girls to life. It is very easy to lump the four girls together into one entity, as the "Eyes on the Prize" documentary did, but Spike Lee was able to set them apart as individuals and shows the grief felt by the friends and relatives to this day. However, the documentary seems to tell only about two-thirds of the story. Some of the nitty-gritty details about the bombing and the investigation are quickly summarized in order to bring the film to a quick conclusion. If I didn't know from other sources, I would not have known, for example, the nature of the bomb -- was it set by a timer? Thrown into the church? (I know from news accounts that it was the latter, but you would not have known if you were uninitiated and just learning through this documentary.) There are also questions that come to mind that Lee leaves unanswered: What was the reaction of the white community in the area (I know, for example, that the bombing was certainly not unanimously cheered by the white south)? How was the bombing investigated? What eventually led the investigators to the guilty parties? The story of the 15 year search for the bomber and his accomplices (in fact, the search went on longer than that, even into the year 2001) is an important part of the story. A film as powerful as this should have taken the time to go into every nook and cranny of the story. Yes, it was excellent. Yes, it should have won the Documentary award for that year. Yes, it brought a tear to my eye. But there could have been so much more, and could have made the story that much more powerful.

This is a great documentary which speaks to the central battles of the civil rights movement and the still present racism in America. Wide range of interview subjects from family members, politicians and those who covered the story when it happened. Spike Lee's work elicits strong emotions at times but also leaves you to provide your own conclusions as well. Recommended along with dramatized movies such as Ghosts of Mississippi, Mississippi Burning and the little watched A Long Walk Home. Watch these to learn something of the darker side of American history and decide for yourself how far we have come in the last forty years.

Whenever I happen to be in a group of people engaged in a discussion on race, whether it has been inspired by something currently in the news, or by an article or even a popular show on TV or a movie, there's always at least one person who asks, "With all the progress that's been made, why do black and Jewish people still put so much emphasis on race and prejudice?"

To answer that question for those people, no matter how well-intentioned they are in their ignorance, Spike Lee has made this film. You cannot be human and not be moved by the terrible story of the sacrifice that these little girls made, nor the lasting effect it had on everyone concerned. In its own way, this story is every bit as important as SCHINDLER'S LIST, and in the wake of recent events--church bombings, racial profiling by the police, the dubious success rate of our penal system turning young black men into hardened thugs into corpses--it is more important now than ever before that stories like these are told, to help us understand why we can only change the direction our generation seems to be headed in, by looking back at where we've been and what it cost us to get to where we are now.

Thanks to Spike Lee for telling this story in such a compelling manner. However, the use of the autopsy photos was so unnecessary. The horror of the event is evoked clearly by the lines on the faces of the survivors, and in their voices. I know the intent was to nail the point home, but for me, as a parent, seeing and hearing the story told by the family was almost too much to take in all at once.