Baltimore, MD--UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III will be featured in Director Spike Lee's Civil Rights documentary film, 4 Little Girls, to be broadcast nationally by the Home Box Office cable network on Monday, February 23, 1998, at 9 p.m. (est).

Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Hrabowski was a ninth-grade classmate of Cynthia Wesley when she, Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson were killed in a bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sunday, September 15, 1963.

"It showed us that no place was safe and nobody was safe," said Hrabowski in a July 17, 1997, Baltimore Sun article. "Imagine four girls in a church. How scared I was!"

Recently nominated for a "Best Documentary" award by the National Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 4 Little Girls looks at a seminal event in the history of the civil-rights movement through archival film footage, home photographs, and interviews with numerous local and national figures whose lives were affected, directly or indirectly, by the tragedy. The film paints individual portraits of the victims as told in anecdotes by family members and childhood friends.

"Lee was able to balance the pain and the hope that were there at the same time," Hrabowski said of the filming in the Sun article, "UMBC Chief Recalls '63 Bombing."