4 Little Girls
[4] A local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan placed bombs at the 16th Street Baptist Church and set them off as Sunday services prepared to commence on the morning of September 15, 1963.The deaths provoked national outrage, and, the following summer, the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.The film covered the events in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 related to civil rights demonstrations and the movement to end racial discrimination in local stores and facilities.The film ends with the trial and conviction in 1977 of Robert Edward Chambliss, also known as Dynamite Bob, as the main person responsible for the bombing, though he is said to have been only one of four Klan members involved.After reading a New York Times Magazine article about the incident, he was moved to write to Chris McNair, the father of Denise, one of the victims, to ask for permission to tell her story on film.Pollard originally refused the overture because he was busy working on his segments of Eyes on the Prize, but ultimately, he accepted, and he has since become one of Lee's most frequent collaborators.We could come to 40 Acres at 7:00 a.m., and we would spend three hours a day screening dailies for two weeks straight ... We talked, selected all the material that we liked, and I started working on the structure in the editing room.The website's critical consensus reads: "4 Little Girls finds Spike Lee moving into documentary filmmaking with his signature style intact -- and all the palpable fury the subject requires.