One evening toward the end of his tragically short life, Martin Luther King Jr. unleashed what must have been years of deeply stifled frustration and sorrow. Drinking alone, he thrashed about his empty hotel room in tears, upsetting furniture and banging on walls, screaming, “I don’t want to do this any more! I want to go back to my little church!” Hearing the disturbance from down the hall, his trusted aides, Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy, rushed to King’s side, removed a bottle of whiskey from his possession, and convinced him to lay down and rest.
Thrust into the public spotlight at the age of 26, King spent his remaining 13 years living out of suitcases, sleeping restlessly on airplanes, serving time in jail, raising money and, when he wasn’t mediating ideological and personal differences within a deeply factious civil rights movement, brokering the end of American apartheid. It’s tempting all these years later to remember MLK as a god, but he was very much human and conscious of his limitations. “Well,” he apologetically told associates the following morning, “now it’s established that I ain’t a saint.”
Few people would dispute the inestimable position that Martin Luther King holds in American history, or the cross that he bore for his millions of countrymen. Reconciling his greatness and fallibility is the same challenge that greets biographers of most towering historical figures. As we approach the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the Voting Rights Act, the quantity and quality of scholarship on MLK is excellent. From the sweeping work of Taylor Branch, David Garrow and Clayborne Carson, to scores of academic monographs that visit different aspects of King’s political development, there is no shortage of important reading material. Lamentably, there is still no great movie—no biopic that measures up to Spielberg’s Lincoln or Attenborough’s Gandhi—works that humanize their subjects without betraying fidelity to historical rigor. Paramount Pictures and filmmaker Ava DuVernay clearly hoped to fill that void with Selma. Regrettably, they fell short by a mile.
As a movie, Selma has a lot to offer. The acting is marvelous (David Oyelowo captures MLK every bit as well as Daniel Day-Lewis imagined Lincoln), the cinematography is striking and—much credit to the director—the violence is startlingly real and intimate. Scenes depicting the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the massacre at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the murder of James Reeb are very difficult to watch. As they should be.
But from a historical perspective, Selma is a deeply flawed work. The film has already provoked considerable debate, particularly around the question of Lyndon Johnson’s role in pressing for federal voting rights legislation. On a more fundamental level, it mingles real, verifiable events with conspiratorial fiction. And for a film about a pivotal moment in MLK’s life, it obscures too much of King’s political and personal genius. The events at Selma stood at the juncture of every theological and practical dilemma that King grappled with in his public career: The limits and utility of nonviolence. The balance between civil disobedience and civil society. How an activist stays politically relevant. Selma skims the surface of these questions, but it never gets to the core.
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Selma opens in late 1964, when King traveled to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. By that date, the historical record shows, he had already determined to stage his next campaign in Selma—the seat of Dallas County, Alabama, where black residents comprised over half the population but only about 2 percent of registered voters.
King’s strategy was at once simple and complicated. Since Congress had six months earlier passed the Civil Rights Act, which barred discrimination in employment, schools and places of public accommodation, the movement had renewed its focus on voting rights—a giant piece of the civil rights puzzle that still required legislative remedy. From a numbers perspective, the decision made sense. As King explained to readers of the New York Times, “Selma has succeeded in limiting Negro registration to the snail’s pace of about 145 persons a year. At this rate, it would take 103 years to register the 15,000 eligible Negro voters of Dallas County.”
Most liberals understood that securing access to the ballot box necessarily comprised an important part of the “Great Society.” Indeed, in a phone conversation on January 15, 1965, Lyndon Johnson named voting rights as a centerpiece of the civil rights agenda and counseled King to galvanize support by “find[ing] the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or South Carolina … And if you just take that one illustration and get it on radio and get it on television and get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings, get it every place you can … then that will help us on what we’re going to shove through in the end.” (From the context of their conversation, it doesn’t appear that LBJ understood that King had already found his “one illustration.”)
On a more fundamental level, Selma was a hornet’s nest of racial violence. King’s own notes explain his thinking: 1. “nonviolent demonstrators go into the streets to exercise their constitutional rights”; 2. “racists resist by unleashing violence against them”; 3. “Americans of conscience in the name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation”; 4. “the Administration, under mass pressure, initiates measures of immediate intervention and remedial legislation.”
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been active in Selma since 1962, but now King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) planned to join the fray and “dramatize the situation to arouse the federal government by marching by the thousands to the places of registration.”
True to form, local authorities took the bait. Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark clapped over 2,000 activists in jail by the end of February 1965 and empowered his officers to rain down unspeakable violence on peaceful protesters. On February 18, state troopers beat and shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 25-year-old voting rights demonstrator. When Jackson died eight days later of his wounds, movement leaders conceived a 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, where they would voice their grievances on the steps of the state capitol. The campaign’s climactic moment occurred on Bloody Sunday—March 7, 1965—when state and county law enforcement officers savagely attacked roughly 500 peaceful marchers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Actually, the word savage doesn’t begin to do justice to what happened that morning. Mounted policemen employed tear gas, electric prods, horse whips and batons wrapped in barbed wire. They pursued marchers who were running desperately in retreat. In 1965, news footage still needed to be flown to New York for national broadcast. That evening, ABC won the race. When the network broke into its regularly scheduled program—the television premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg—millions of viewers were confronted with gut-wrenching scenes that jarred the nation’s conscience.
Two more marches ensued—one, led by King, in which protesters proceeded to the bridge, knelt, prayed and turned back; and another, which culminated in a historic trek to Montgomery. Lyndon Johnson spoke before a rare joint session of Congress and demanded voting rights legislation. And the rest, as they say, was history. Except not in Selma.
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Movies need to assume some creative license, and a few small embellishments or errors don’t necessarily sink a great enterprise, unless they are emblematic of deeper interpretive flaws. In this case, they are.
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1 Comment
Hi everyone – please note that Zeitz’ article doesn’t end here – it’s three times as long. For the full piece please go to http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/selma-martin-luther-king-113911_full.html