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After my tepid response to Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, I approached her earlier film Selma with some trepidation. Fortunately, this proved misplaced. Selma is an excellent movie, and it’s also a timely one - and has only become more timely since it was released in 2014.
In particular, I needed the reminder that protest movements can take a long time to work, and that on a day-to-day level it can seem as if injustice after injustice is piling up while progress is slow as molasses if it exists at all, and victory only looks inevitable after it happens. And yet it can be right around the corner just when times look dark.
When Selma takes place, times do look dark for Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellow civil rights activists. Less than a year ago, they won a landmark victory in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - but enforcement is glacially slow, and they feel a mounting concern that the Civil Rights Act, like the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, may become another empty and unenforced law.
How to prevent this? If the Fifteenth Amendment were enforced - and therefore black voters could hold elected officials accountable for their actions by voting them out of office - then southern officials would have an incentive to enforce the laws, however grudgingly, without the need of intervention from the north. The march from Selma to Montgomery is therefore a strategy to draw national attention back to the issue, and demonstrate that the Civil Rights Act on its own has barely begun to change entrenched systems of prejudice and discrimination in the south.
This is an inherently dramatic situation, and DuVernay handles it expertly. I don’t know enough about the era to know if her rendition is wholly accurate, but it’s convincing and dramatically compelling.
I was particularly impressed by DuVernay’s skill in juggling the many players in the drama. She shows the divisions within the Civil Rights movement. King’s group, the SCLC, has tension with the student organization SNCC as well as Malcolm X; we don’t meet any of the more radical groups, but they remain a constant unseen presence as well as an important part of King’s strategy. The existence of violent groups, he knows, make his own methods more acceptable to white moderates like President Lyndon B. Johnson.
I thought her solution to keeping the FBI in the story was particularly clever. FBI head J. Edgar Hoover only shows up in one scene, but the FBI remains an omnipresent (and ominous) through the brief surveillance reports that show up like subtitles on the screen. (These also serve double-duty by helping the viewer keep track of who’s who.)
It struck me that King’s particular genius, at least in this portrayal, lay in his ability to balance all these different groups in order to achieve his goals. Everyone else is pursuing their own goals with little reference to how other people will react, whereas King looks at the whole political field like a chessboard. He picks Selma as his battlefield because the county has a particularly vicious racist sheriff, who will undoubtedly attack the protesters, which will end with footage on national television that will horrify white moderates, which will give Johnson even more impetus to act, thereby adding to the pressure he already feels from his concern that delay may strengthen black nationalist groups...
But even King can’t know beforehand whether this tactic will be successful, or worth the sacrifice that confronting a bigoted, violent police chief may entail. He just has to cast the dice, and pray.
In particular, I needed the reminder that protest movements can take a long time to work, and that on a day-to-day level it can seem as if injustice after injustice is piling up while progress is slow as molasses if it exists at all, and victory only looks inevitable after it happens. And yet it can be right around the corner just when times look dark.
When Selma takes place, times do look dark for Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellow civil rights activists. Less than a year ago, they won a landmark victory in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - but enforcement is glacially slow, and they feel a mounting concern that the Civil Rights Act, like the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, may become another empty and unenforced law.
How to prevent this? If the Fifteenth Amendment were enforced - and therefore black voters could hold elected officials accountable for their actions by voting them out of office - then southern officials would have an incentive to enforce the laws, however grudgingly, without the need of intervention from the north. The march from Selma to Montgomery is therefore a strategy to draw national attention back to the issue, and demonstrate that the Civil Rights Act on its own has barely begun to change entrenched systems of prejudice and discrimination in the south.
This is an inherently dramatic situation, and DuVernay handles it expertly. I don’t know enough about the era to know if her rendition is wholly accurate, but it’s convincing and dramatically compelling.
I was particularly impressed by DuVernay’s skill in juggling the many players in the drama. She shows the divisions within the Civil Rights movement. King’s group, the SCLC, has tension with the student organization SNCC as well as Malcolm X; we don’t meet any of the more radical groups, but they remain a constant unseen presence as well as an important part of King’s strategy. The existence of violent groups, he knows, make his own methods more acceptable to white moderates like President Lyndon B. Johnson.
I thought her solution to keeping the FBI in the story was particularly clever. FBI head J. Edgar Hoover only shows up in one scene, but the FBI remains an omnipresent (and ominous) through the brief surveillance reports that show up like subtitles on the screen. (These also serve double-duty by helping the viewer keep track of who’s who.)
It struck me that King’s particular genius, at least in this portrayal, lay in his ability to balance all these different groups in order to achieve his goals. Everyone else is pursuing their own goals with little reference to how other people will react, whereas King looks at the whole political field like a chessboard. He picks Selma as his battlefield because the county has a particularly vicious racist sheriff, who will undoubtedly attack the protesters, which will end with footage on national television that will horrify white moderates, which will give Johnson even more impetus to act, thereby adding to the pressure he already feels from his concern that delay may strengthen black nationalist groups...
But even King can’t know beforehand whether this tactic will be successful, or worth the sacrifice that confronting a bigoted, violent police chief may entail. He just has to cast the dice, and pray.
