January 28, 2015--"Selma"

As award season unfolds there is controversy surrounding the film Selma. Some are asking why, if it was nominated for an Oscar for best picture, why weren't the director, Ava DuVernay, and David Oyelowo who plays Martin Luther King nominated? Could it be, it is being whispered, because of Hollywood's racism? Forgetting for the moment that last year, Twelve Years A Slave won for best picture.

An additional controversy surrounds the depiction of Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the time. In "Selma" he is represented as resisting King's efforts to secure legislation to strip away impediments to Negroes being able to register and vote in the South and is shown needing to be pressured and even forced to support this struggle.

The historical record reveals this to be untrue and thus the film presents a seriously unfair picture of LBJ and his position on voting rights. In fact, some former Johnson aides and historians are claiming that the idea to march in Selma was more LBJ's than King's and they marshall evidence from audio tapes of White House conversations between MLK and Johnson to support that view.

Here, from the transcript of a taped telephone call between King on Johnson on January 15, 1965 (two months before the King-led Selma campaign) is that evidence of LBJ's commitment and how he suggested the strategy--

JOHNSON: We take the position that every person born in this country, when he reaches a certain age, that he have the right to vote . . . whether it's a Negro, whether it's a Mexican, or who it is . . . . I think you can contribute a great deal by getting your leaders and you, yourself, taking very simple elements of discrimination; where a [black] man's got . . . to quote the first 10 Amendments [in a voter registration literacy test], . . . and some people don't have to do that, but when a Negro comes in to do it, and if we can, just repeat and repeat and repeat. 

And if you can find 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, get it on television, get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings, get it everyplace you can. Pretty soon the fellow that didn't do anything but drive a tractor will say, "Well, that's not right," and then that will help us on what we're going to shove through [Congress] in the end. 

KING: Yes. 

JOHNSON:  And if we do that we will break through. It will be the greatest breakthrough of anything, not even excepting this '64 [Civil Rights] Act, I think the greatest achievement of my administration.

This does not sound like LBJ needed to be dragged kicking and screaming to support the voting rights agenda.

What would have been the problem to represent King and Johnson as partners, albeit wary partners?  Let's see what the film's director had to say about this distortion of history.

When asked, Ava DuVernay said that the original screenplay needed "extensive rewriting" because it was a script for a "traditional bio-pic" that presented "antiquated and patronizing" ideas about history and the civil rights movement.

In her words--

If, in 2014, we're still making 'white-savior movies' than it's just lazy and unfortunate. We've grown up as a country and cinema should be able to reflect what's true. And what's true is that black folks are the center of their own lives and should tell their own stories from their own experiences. [My italics.]

Even if what is represented as "true" isn't.

It is a shame that this otherwise inspiring and meaningful movie is being shown to young students as a full and accurate history of that brave era. I think it might have been the Reverend King himself who many times reminded us that it is only the truth that will set us free.