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⡘ 179 Remembering Birmingham Sunday Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls Valerie Smith Birmingham, Alabama, especially pre-1970s Birmingham, often conjures up images of white racism at its most virulent.1 During the period from 1947 to 1963, fifty black homes and churches were bombed. The Birmingham police department and Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, commissioner of public safety, were notorious for their aggressive opposition to civil rights activism.2 Photographs of the white military tank in which Connor patrolled black neighborhoods and footage of police officers beating, fire hosing, and setting dogs on demonstrators circulated nationally and internationally, putting a face on southern white resistance to black demands for equal rights and social justice. After the naacp was banned from the state of Alabama in 1956, the Alabama Christian Movement, led by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, was created to fight for freedom and full citizenship rights, including the desegregation of public accommodations and schools and the integration of the police force in Birmingham. But when the city’s intransigent establishment failed to respond—indeed, brutally resisted direct action—Reverend Shuttlesworth sought the support of what was by the early sixties the most prominent and nationally visible civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (sclc), headed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, King himself referred to Birmingham as “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”3 This perception of Birmingham was only confirmed by the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, just months after the Birmingham movement had won the battle over the segregation of public facilities in the city and just weeks after the march on Washington. The bombing of Sixteenth Street Church took the lives of four young African American girls—Denise McNair (age eleven) and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley 180 Valerie Smith (all age fourteen)—during Sunday School as they prepared to participate in the Youth Day worship service. Some observers saw this bombing of a movement church at a time when it was certain to be filled with young people as a deliberately calculated act of retribution because it occurred so soon after the Birmingham Children’s Crusade of 1963, when hundreds of middle school, high school, and college students marched and went to jail to protest segregated public facilities. Others have seen it as an act of terrorism, an attack on a randomly selected site intended to display the perpetrators’ power over black citizens and their confidence that they could operate outside of the law. Whether viewed as random, deliberately retributive, or both, this bombing is perceived as one of the key events that directed the attention of the nation, if not the world, to the savage extremes to which white supremacists, unchecked, would resort. Correspondingly, the martyred Sunday School girls have come to symbolize the innocence and moral rectitude of southern black communities under siege.4 The past couple of decades have seen an outpouring of literary and cinematic texts that take what is commonly known as the modern civil rights movement or the southern freedom struggle as their subject. The recent resurgence of interest in the civil rights movement among writers, musicians, performance artists, and visual artists acknowledges the transformative impact of the activism, rhetoric, theology, and iconography of the period. Not only did the civil rights movement substantially alter the social, political, and spatial configuration of relations within the United States, but it also exerted a profound influence on other movements for racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual equality around the world. Mainstream representations frequently confirm popular constructions of the movement, presented as a primarily southern phenomenon, neatly bracketed by the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In this view, the movement is a chapter in a progressive, ameliorative vision of U.S. history where southern extremists were pitted against cross-racial coalitions led by morally courageous and spiritually inspired individuals. Through shared sacrifice and exemplary action, the movement triumphed over white supremacy and delivered the nation from its past injustices into a bright future of freedom, equality, and opportunity. This interpretation of the civil rights movement, common to Hollywood films such as Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988), Richard Pearce’s The Long Walk Home (1990), and Rob Reiner’s Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) or to made-for-television films such as Robert Dornhelm’s Sins of the Father (2002), has maintained...

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