Selma: Not Your Traditional Civil Rights Movie

By Davey D. Cook, Guest Columnist and Oakland-based Community Activist

A few thoughts on the movie Selma: First and foremost go see it. Again, I repeat, go see the movie.

It’s powerful; it’s moving; it’s inspiring; it opens the doors for deeper and more critical conversations. At a time when the rewriting textbooks in many states have completely erased movements, heroes and heroines, this movie takes on added importance.

At a time when states, such as Arizona, are going full tilt in banning and removing books from the classroom and are making it unlawful to have ethnic studies taught in the classroom, Selma is important.

At a time when we are constantly bombarded with white savior-type movies and narratives that downplay and marginalize black agency, then coupled with an onslaught of clownish reality shows neatly packaged and sold to us as primary examples of ‘black culture,’ Selma is important.

At a time when millions of our children are subjected to mandated, backward, ill-intentioned programs like ‘No Child Left Behind’ and ‘Common Core,’ which are seemingly designed to suppress critical thinking, Selma is important.

For those of us who are students of history or have been blessed with parents, relatives or key individuals in our lives who directed us to materials that provided a ‘more accurate’ political and social context of the accounts connected to Selma, we have a responsibility to use this movie as a teaching tool.

We have responsibility to take the excitement this movie has generated and turn folks on to all the people and outlying narratives director Ava DuVernay weaves in and out of the movie.

We should be digging deeper into the scene that depicts Malcolm X coming to Selma and meeting with Coretta Scott King. We should be asking ‘How did King and X’s philosophy compliment each other?’ In the movie, King is shown saying the tactics he deployed resulted in real change. But as Malcolm notes in the movie perhaps that was possible because those in power feared him and the militant type of approach he represented. Why not have serious discussions about that?

We should really focus on the outright brutality and the repression shown in the film. Let’s not take it for granted. Let’s explore what terrorism in the United States looked like and what many would argue still looks like 50 years later. We had churches being bombed and people being killed with impunity. We also had ordinary folks who were willing to risk life, limb and freedom to get rights we take for granted today. How does what happened then mirror, or differ from, what’s happening today when so many of our people are being killed by police?

We should be having robust discussions about the role former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his Cointel-Pro program played. In the movie its accurately shows how disrupting and destroying families was an important aspect used by the FBI. Excellent documentaries like Cointe-Pro 101 by The Freedom Archives underscore this fact.

You can find the documentary, How the FBI Sabotaged Black America, online, which can provide additional information. We need to discuss domestic surveillance back in 1965 and domestic surveillance today and ask why that issue has not been resolved. We need to ask why it is accepted in some circles in 2015?

In the film, we hear discussion about what took place in Albany, Ga. when civil rights leaders confronted police Chief Laurie Pritchett. In the film, King asks if the police chief in Selma, Jim Clark was like Pritchett or Bull Connor? It informs the strategy for how leaders approach Selma.

For us watching, we should look into how those in power adapted to King’s strategy of filling jails. In the PBS series Eyes on the Prize episode 4 called, “No Easy Walk,” Pritchett talks about how he read. King’s book and found a way to redo mass arrests and not have it impact the city’s operations. He rendered King’s strategy useless. We should be discussing how those tactics work today?

We should be looking up figures like James Lee Jackson, who was shot and killed by Alabama State troopers, and understand what he meant to Movement. We should be exploring the killing of white religious leader James Reeb and how that galvanized the nation. That led to people, like former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Toure), pointing out the inherent racism of America. The country would sit quietly when black people like Jimmy Lee Jackson was killed fighting for freedom but be up in arms and ready to make change when the victim is white.

We should be exploring Diane Nash, who was labeled in the movie as a female agitator. She only has one line but was a young, college-age, shrewd, fearless and important strategist for the Civil Rights Movement. She was also a primary architect in the freedom rides and sit-ins that took place in the years leading up to Selma. She was someone who faced off with mayors and was arrested dozens of time, willing to go to jail while pregnant. An entire film could and should be made about her.

Another gem Selma brings to light are the tensions and disagreements that King and members of his SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) had with SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). In the film SCLC are the centerpiece, but there is lots to say about the important role SNCC played historically in the black liberation struggle, as well as in the crucial groundwork they laid down in Selma doing voting rights work, before King and SCLC arrived.

There are lots to be said about how a more militant approach was adapting to the times versus the non-violent strategy employed by King. And, while the movie doesn’t go too deep into SNCC, Selma can and should inspire us to dig deep and learn more about them as with the other aforementioned leaders and organizations brought forth in the movie.

In a recent conversation good friend and historian professor, Jared Ball, encourages us to read Making of Black Revolutionaries by James Forman, who was the executive director of SNCC. He also notes that the downplaying of SNCC is reflective of a larger trend in which, far too often, militant aspects of the civil rights and black freedom struggles are eclipsed.

To underscore his point of systemic erasing, Ball noted that in the film James Forman’s last name is never mentioned and he was never given a text summary at the end of the film as others did. He also pointed out that the total exclusion Carmichael/Ture and Ella Baker is simply inexcusable.

SNCC should not be seen as just some fly by note organization that only marched. They were astute organizers who stuck around and built community weeks and months at a time. They played a crucial role in Freedom Summer of 64. They ran freedom schools.

We should be exploring the organizing and voter registration work that Kwame and SNCC folks did during and after the Selma marches in Klan invested Lowndes County, which led to the formation of the Black Panther political party. The Black Panther political party is different than the Black Panther party, which would later be formed in Oakland with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

I would add that the PBS Eyes on the Prize series in particular episodes 3 ‘Ain’t Scared of Your Jails,’ which deals with the Freedom Rides, Episode 4 ‘No Easy Walk,’ which focuses on SCLC and SNCC and the campaign they did in Albany, Ga., as well as Episode 6 ‘Bridge to Freedom,’ which focuses on Selma are good materials to check out. I’ll try and post links in the comment section of this post.

What I feel is important about showing this tension between the two organizations (SCLC and SNCC), is that at the end of the day they managed to work together and show unity. Ava DuVernay accurately brings this to light in the film. In the Eyes on the Prize episode on Selma, they show James Forman at a press conference talking about this issue directly and how they were united.

There are too many gems to cite that are excellently highlighted in Selma that we should be building on.

At a time when we have so many protests, unrest and inevitable growing pains around movements to put an end to police terror, discussions around movement building generated by Selma are important and surely needed.

With regards to Selma being snubbed by the Oscars I agree wholeheartedly with Spike Lee, “F’em!” The academy deserves an unapologetic middle finger and at the same time, this snub should serve as inspiration for us to not look for validation from institutions that time and time again marginalize and ridicule us and our accomplishments.

If we are going to have award shows, perhaps its time to revisit and revitalize the Oscar Micheaux Awards that were started by the late Ava Montague of San Francisco. This had a nice run in the late 1980s early 90s.

The primary push back on Selma within the mainstream circles centers around how DuVernay depicts Kings relationship with President Lyndon Johnson. Folks seemed upset that King was shown as someone who stood on his own two feet, was uncompromising and actually pushed, defied and agitated the president to do the right thing with regards to bringing into fruition the Voting Rights Act.

Even more troubling is some brought into the notion that Johnson led the Civil Rights Movement and directed King and was the brain power behind the marches on Selma. They point to a taped phone call Johnson had with King as proof positive. DuVernay saw such assertions as ‘jaw dropping.’

Rep. John Lewis who at the time (1965) was a member of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and prominently featured in the film recently penned an Op-ed, for the Los Angeles Times rebuffing that erroneous notion.

In it, he writes:

Were any of the Selma marches the brainchild of President Johnson? Absolutely not. If a man is chained to a chair, does anyone need to tell him he should struggle to be free? The truth is the marches occurred mainly due to the extraordinary vision of the ordinary people of Selma, who were determined to win the right to vote, and it is their will that made a way.

As for the phone call, Lewis notes:

…the president knew he was recording himself, so maybe he was tempted to verbally stack the deck about his role in Selma in his favor. The facts, however, do not bear out the assertion that Selma was his idea. I know. I was there. Don’t get me wrong, in my view, Johnson is one of this country’s great presidents, but he did not direct the civil rights movement.   

The critiques around Johnson and his relationship to King is telling, especially when it comes from folks who heaped praise upon films like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, where actor Daniel Day-Lewis’ Lincoln was hailed as groundbreaking.

The film went on to win lots of Golden Globe and Academy Awards. When it was pointed out “this great film” had omitted former enslaved Africans-turned-freedom fighters and staunch abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth who played crucial roles in pushing Lincoln to address the issue of slavery, it was dismissed as “no big deal.”

“It’s just a movie not a documentary,” some claimed, even as it was being hailed as a cinematic masterpiece all should watch to learn about Lincoln. People were told the story was about Lincoln, not Douglass or Truth, and thus not central to the storyline of the movie. The omission of Douglass is a salient point Lewis makes in his Op-Ed.

The bottom line is Selma is not a “white savoir” type film. It doesn’t have a prominent white character that saves the day for the “needy helpless Negro.”

Sadly, that becomes a problem for some because it goes against the popular narrative many have come to hold. Maybe the angst that many feel around King being so uncompromising in the movie is that it’s a tactic we should be using today with all our elected officials.

King had a good relationship with Johnson, and yet in the movie he pushed him and pushed him hard. Should we not be doing that with President Barack Obama and other elected officials we like and admire or have good relationships with?

For those who suggest King wasn’t that aggressive and uncompromising as shown in the film, explain how it was that King went hard in the paint around the issue of the Vietnam War angering Johnson, as well as other prominent Civil Rights leaders.

People love King now, but forget he was absolutely despised in 1968 and publicly skewered by many because he stuck to his principles and made the important international connection between the war in Vietnam and the war at home. King in his final days said time and time again this was not about being popular, getting a check or being friends with the president; it was about justice and doing what’s right. How does that apply today in our collective actions?

Selma is a [great] movie that hopefully leads to more exploration into our past, which is then juxtaposed with what is going on the freedom movements today. Selma was 50 years ago and we still have many of the same problems including a return of some of the egregious tactics used to stop us from voting, which led to a Selma Movement in the first place.