13th

 Angela Davis

Newt Gingrich

Gingrich with director Ava DuVernay

Michelle Alexander

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Nixon

President Ronald Reagan

stills from Birth of a Nation (1915)

Angela Davis from a 1972 prison interview

New York Congressman Charles Rangel

Bryan Stevenson, lawyer, social justice activist, and founder, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative

United States Senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker

Kalief Browder

The Supreme Court Building, engraved with "Equal Justice Under Law"

Director Ava DuVernay

13^th           A               

USA  (100 mi)  2016  d: Ava DuVernay

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
—The 13^th Amendment, passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, ratified by the states on December 6, 1865

Since the very public police murder of George Floyd and the massive Black Lives Matter protest demonstrations around the world that have followed, this film, more than any other, should be considered mandatory viewing, more relevant now than in the year it was released on cable TV’s Netflix, which was immediately prior to the Trump presidential election.  Described as 150 years in the making, offering context to this current moment in time, this is the definitive film in documenting the shameful history of racism in America, investigating the issue of mass incarceration in the United States in relation to the 13^th Amendment while providing ample evidence of mistreating and criminalizing black men, reframing history from a black perspective that is not taught in schools or contained in history books, yet offering a culturally impactive point of view, as it clearly draws a continuous line and shows how racism has evolved unabated since the Civil War supposedly freed the slaves, offering a disturbing yet highly evocative picture of just how we got here.  Some archival footage is graphically horrifying, like the picture of an elderly gentleman being taunted and harassed simply for walking down the street, repeatedly knocked down by a mob of white attackers, acts that repeat themselves during Trump rallies where he urges his followers to be particularly rough on black protesters, seen being spit on, kicked, and pushed around, with Trump reminiscing how this used to be such common practice “back in the good old days,” like unleashing the dogs in Birmingham, with the director skillfully connecting the past to the present.  Much of this film will feel singed and imprinted on the brain, using recurring rap and hip-hop songs as transitions, tracing the roots to Reconstruction era misuse of the 13^th Amendment, to lynchings and the Jim Crow era, and to the coded language of law and order, which means something entirely different to black and white communities, all affecting the current policies of mass incarceration of black people.  One significant factor the films fails to address is the incarceration of black women, with the numbers rising substantially since the making of the film, while it also stays away from the racial disparities that exist for those prisoners on Death Row.  Former President Obama opens the film by announcing that the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population, a statistic that flies in the face of “The land of the free,” where a disproportionate majority of those imprisoned are black.  While there are a wide range of talking points, using interviews with many notable experts, scholars, civil rights leaders, politicians, and activists, as well as prominent opponents, offering a range of opinion that is not over anyone’s head but feels easily understandable despite the complexity of the subject, none are more prominent than Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow (2012), whose expertise paints a picture going back to the Civil War, finding a loophole in the 13^th Amendment, as slavery ended for all practical purposes, “except for those convicted of a crime.”  The Southern economy was decimated after the war, made worse by the fact all the free labor from slavery was suddenly emancipated, so Southern states devised a strategy of criminalizing minor offenses, then rounding up and arresting blacks with a vengeance afterwards, often for minor charges like vagrancy or loitering, imprisoned if they could not pay the fines, but once incarcerated the State was free to exploit the fruits of their labor, institutionalizing a practice known as convict leasing, or forced penal servitude, forcing prisoners to do the backbreaking plantation work done by former slaves.  The practice was extremely profitable, in 1898, for instance, 73% of Alabama’s entire annual state revenue came from convict leasing.  In effect, this systematic loophole allowed States to profit from an unwritten form of slavery even after it was abolished, mostly targeting blacks who were sent to field work on chain-gangs.  The documentary film THE FARM:  ANGOLA, USA (1998) reveals the largest maximum-security prison in the United States is known as Angola, named after the area in Africa that provided the slave labor, situated on an old slave plantation in Louisiana, overwhelmingly populated by black inmates and staffed by a white administration, with inmates paid 4 cents an hour to pick cotton out in the hot sun while white overseers on horseback with long rifles guard against escapes.  Generations of black men have been trapped by this system, with Mississippi’s Parchman Farm penitentiary arguably the most notorious abuser, continuing this practice until WWII, thoroughly documented by Wall Street reporter Douglas Blackmon in his 2008 book Slavery by Another Name, suggesting slavery in the United States did not end with the Civil War, but instead persisted well into the 20^th century. 

DuVernay also gives a master class dissertation on the mythology of black criminality in D. W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), a blockbuster hit that had an incredible impact on the nation both artistically and historically, viewed at the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, who revered the film, but this set the tone for the stereotypical myths of how blacks are perceived in America today, particularly black men, as they were demonized as animals, rapists, and criminals, continuing a pattern of whites associating them with criminalization, where in the film the Ku Klux Klan actually comes to the rescue of a virginal white girl to save the day, like the arrival of the cavalry, the heroes on horseback in white robes.  The burning of a cross was never part of their history until D. W. Griffith liked the cinematic effect, revitalizing a lackluster organization that suddenly experienced a resurgence, introducing a new reign of terror across the South, where black homes were burned, black men lynched openly in public, where the prevalence of historical photographs come from whites who were there either witnessing or participating in these atrocities.  Griffith’s depiction, however, lit the fuse, openly declaring black men are criminals, a perception that exists even today, with some like the Fraternal Order of Police, but also several prominent elected officials, including Senators and a President viewing the Black Lives Matter movement as a terrorist group, though they ardently practice non-violence.  These same officials are silent on the police brutality that is aimed against black victims, attributing all the aggressiveness to blacks, who are still viewed in their eyes as criminals, even when there is no evidence whatsoever of threatening behavior.  George Floyd, for instance, showed no signs of police resistance, but fully cooperated.  Let’s not forget, Dr. King and his peaceful protesters were similarly viewed as “troublemakers” and “threatening.”  In the face of all rational reason, where does that mindset come from?  Are we placing too much significance on a movie, you may ask?  John Ford did the same thing with his racist treatment of Indians as savages in his westerns.  What’s significant is that Griffith, like Ford, are both considered among the greatest American filmmakers that ever lived, given substantial weight in instilling moral values through each new generation from their movies, with each making films for more than half a century.  Nothing exists in a vacuum, but is part of an extended pattern of principles developed by earlier generations setting the stage for this moment in time.  Displaying well-researched clinical precision, DuVernay traces the root of the racist vitriol to Reconstruction, followed by D. W. Griffith’s immensely popular BIRTH OF A NATION, a box office bonanza that relentlessly dehumanizes blacks, instilling irrational fear, where this same perception led us to the 90’s term “superpredator,” with blacks continually perceived as menacing threats.  The Black Lives Matter group was originated by three black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, formed after the acquittal of the murderer of a 17-year old black teenager Trayvon Martin, identified as George Zimmerman, an overly zealous neighborhood watch leader who actually followed him through the neighborhood, viewing him as suspicious solely by his race, thinking he doesn’t belong, before confronting him with a gun and shooting him, claiming self-defense afterwards, though he was the pursuer with the gun.  In Florida they have a stand your ground law, which allows use of a weapon if you feel threatened, so police did not initially charge him with a crime.  After a public outcry, Zimmerman was arrested, but he was acquitted of all charges at trial, which makes little sense, since Zimmerman was clearly the aggressor.  This typically describes what is commonly viewed as racial injustice, as whites routinely kill blacks with impunity and there are no consequences for their actions, as you can literally get away with murder.  The number of unarmed black men who followed in these same footsteps go back to the brutal murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year old boy who was lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman (who years later acknowledged she fabricated her testimony), his body badly mutilated afterwards, yet his mother insisted upon an open casket funeral, as she wanted the entire world to see just how one human being was savagely defiled.  There are 41 names of martyrs listed on the Civil Rights Memorial (Civil Rights Martyrs), to which we may add Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Alton Sterling, Botham Jean, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, Freddie Gray, Stephon Clark, Sam DuBose, Tyre King, Terence Crutcher, Keith Lamont Scott, Reginald Thomas Jr, LaQuan McDonald, Eric Courtney Harris, George Floyd, Akai Gurley, Tanisha Anderson, Sandra Bland, Breanna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Ahmaud Arbery, and the list goes on of countless more black individuals who have unjustly died at the hands of police.   

 Mass Incarceration Can't Be Fixed by Legislation ... - Bloomberg   Michelle Alexander in a 2016 interview

I don’t view mass incarceration as just a problem of politics or policy, I view it as a profound moral and spiritual crisis as well.  I think that racial justice in this country will remain a distant dream as long as we think that it can be achieved simply through rational policy discussions. If we take a purely technocratic approach to these issues and strip them of their moral and spiritual dimensions, I think we’ll just keep tinkering and tinkering and fail to realize that all of these issues really have more to do with who we are individually and collectively, and what we believe we owe one another, and how we ought to treat one another as human beings.

These are philosophical questions, moral questions, theological questions, as much as they are questions about the costs and benefits of using one system of punishment or policing practice over another.

The important word here is criminalization, as blacks merely by their skin color generate a fear in whites, where they are typically viewed as criminals.  Politicians have exploited this stereotype, using crime as a stand-in for race, with Michelle Alexander reminding us that Ronald Reagan politicized race when he criminalized drug offenses, implementing a war on drugs, shifting what was originally perceived as a health issue to a criminal issue, going on a Nixonian law and order tirade about locking up drug offenders, who were viewed as the scourge of the earth, yet only black offenders were targeted, as police avoided drug raids in white neighborhoods.  DuVernay produces an audio tape of Reagan’s Republican political strategist Lee Atwater acknowledging their intention was to highlight crime in the eyes of the public, shifting the blame to blacks who would be the ones most adversely affected, suggesting this was by design, part of the Republican Party's appeal to southern white conservatives, a racist Southern strategy appealing to white voters by highlighting the criminalization of blacks, initiating a renewed incarceration of black men, where at the time the prisons only contained about 200,000 inmates in 1972, yet those numbers rapidly started to rise, increasing each decade.  They skyrocketed, however, with Bill Clinton’s signing of the Omnibus Crime Bill (originally written by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, by the way), which provided for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in discretionary funding for police prevention programs, which led to the militarization of police, using weapons of war to fight neighborhood crime, while also mandating a three-strikes provision addressing repeat offenders who would be sentenced to life in prison upon their third offense.  When crack cocaine entered the picture, predominately distributed in urban black neighborhoods because small quantities were cheap, but overwhelmingly addictive, while the powdered substance was predominately in the white suburbs.  In an epic tale of disproportional racial injustice, the sentence for one ounce of crack cocaine was the same as 100 ounces of powdered cocaine, so not only were blacks being locked up in record numbers, comprising one-third of the prison population that reached a staggering 2.3 million in 2016 (with 90% of those in state or local jails, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2016 | Prison Policy Initiative), but they were sent away for long periods of time, basically disrupting the family concept, as one out of every three black men was sent to prison, while whites in the suburbs were getting away with a slap on the wrist.  According to U.S. Senator from New Jersey Cory Booker, “We now have more African-Americans under criminal supervision than all the slaves back in the 1850’s.”  DuVernay also exposes the influence of ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that merges corporate interests into the political process, giving them a weighted advantage, where they’re literally able to write bills that are advantageous to their own profits, which led to the growth of for-profit prisons and massive incarcerations, including a cash-for-prisoners model that generates millions for private bail and incarceration firms, including immigrant detention centers along the border, which are prisons for profit, known for minimally low health standards and atrociously poor food. Somehow, it was not enough to send people to prisons, but they had to suffer there through inhumane treatment, where punishment became systematically integrated into incarceration, an outgrowth of ALEC, along with those crime bills signed by Clinton, and the Stand Your Ground gun laws, now expanded to 30 states.  While offering a sobering look at our corrupt prison and judicial systems, perhaps the singlemost egregious offense exposing exactly what’s wrong is the case of Kalief Browder, a Bronx high school student who was imprisoned for three years, two of them in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, without being convicted of a crime.  He was accused at 16 of stealing a backpack, and his family was unable to afford his bail, set at $3,000, so he languished in prison.  95% of the elected prosecutors in America are white, who typically make deals with these young kids, getting them to plead guilty to lesser crimes that they didn’t commit, simply to be released from prison.  Browder refused a plea deal, convinced he was innocent, suggesting the police even invented the backpack, giving his case a certain notoriety, yet his prison treatment was horribly inhumane, not at all in accordance with his alleged crime, as he was just a kid sent to adult prison, routinely attacked and beaten up by prison guards and treated mercilessly, attempting suicide on several occasions.  Upon his release, when all charges were dropped, he was permanently damaged by the abuses he endured, attempting to end his life several times before finally succeeding two years later at the age of 22.  What did this kid do to deserve that treatment?  To expose just how backwards our system of justice has become, you’re treated worse if you’re innocent and poor than if you’re guilty and rich, where ingrained into the judicial sentencing is the social class of the offender, where being black, exactly as envisioned by D. W. Griffith, still retains an association with criminality in the eyes of whites.

“The Black Lives Matter Movement has to be understood in the context of the historical legacy of the ill treatment of blacks by the police and the criminal justice system and American political and social institutions more generally. That legacy is a fact.”

—Daniel Nagin, 2014 recipient of the Stockholm Prize on Criminology, an elected fellow of the American Society of Criminology, Police, Violence, and Data: The Black Lives Matter Movement ...

Selma

 
Early poster naming Lee Daniels as the director  

 
Amelia Boynton being cared for by an unnamed marcher after being knocked unconscious in a police attack on Selma protesters trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, March 7th  

 
The 2nd attempt to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge is forced to turn around on Tuesday, March 9th  

Martin Luther King and wife Coretta lead marchers across the Alabama River on the first day of the Selma-to-Montgomery march on March 21st  

SELMA           B     
USA  Great Britain  (127 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Ava DuVernay            Official Site

The movement is a rhythm to us
Freedom is like religion to us
Justice is juxtaposition in us
Justice for all just ain't specific enough
One son died, his spirit is revisitin' us
Truant livin' livin' in us, resistance is us
That's why Rosa sat on the bus
That's why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up
When it go down we woman and man up
They say, "Stay down" and we stand up
Shots, we on the ground, the camera panned up
King pointed to the mountain top and we ran up

One day, when the glory comes
It will be ours, it will be ours
Oh, one day, when the war is one
We will be sure, we will be here sure
Oh, glory, glory

[HD] Common & John Legend - Glory (Selma) - GMA ... YouTube (3:12)

One supposes that each generation needs to revisit their relationship with history, especially events recent enough to still be fresh in our minds, where the release of this film comes on the heels of the marches in Ferguson, Missouri, precipitated by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, an unarmed 18-year old black youth shot by a white police officer.  Written by first-time white screenwriter Paul Webb, with considerable uncredited rewrites by the director herself (specifically some of Martin Luther King’s speeches, as the rights had previously been obtained by other film studios), SELMA is a historical drama of events during the Civil Rights movement, African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–68), taking place in the early months of 1965, coming after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination, but the powers to enforce the act remained weak, making it difficult for blacks to register to vote, where the film documents the non-violent methods of civil disobedience implemented by Martin Luther King in the voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama that turned into an all-out assault by the local police, smashing heads with Billy clubs and beating several marchers unconscious, images broadcast across the nation that eventually lead to an outpouring of support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed into law several months later on August 6, 1965.  The film shows how the past is still relevant to the present, and that progress is never guaranteed, especially because the events of the past bear an uncanny resemblance to events of today, particularly the number of young black men being shot and killed by police officers, making this essential viewing.  Just as importantly, on June 25, 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (Oyez: Shelby County v. Holder) essentially struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws overnight without Federal oversight, where incredibly Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that the law was “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”  With Republicans making dire warnings of predicted “voter fraud,” even with no evidence or previous history of fraud, 13 states quickly passed more restrictive voter ID laws, as scores of election laws were suddenly enacted banning same day registration, a common practice in some states, and requiring voter ID’s in a blatant attempt to thin the ranks of poor and minority voters, where according to this November 5, 2014 article, How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make, by Wendy R. Reiser, a former NYU Law School professor, the changes already had a significant impact as recently as the November 2014 elections that ushered in a Republican landslide, where once again millions of disenfranchised voters across the country were legally turned away from polling booths, 600,000 in Texas alone, exactly as they were half a century ago. 

While SELMA is considered a “black” film, largely due to the historical civil rights subject matter, where this is the first fictional film depicting Martin Luther King and is actually that rare Hollywood film directed by a black woman, but only three out of eleven producers backing the film are black, including billionaire television mogul Oprah Winfrey, the director herself, and Paul Garnes, an executive producer from the Tyler Perry Studios.  With one Latina working out of Hollywood, all the rest are white, including Brad Pitt and two other execs from his Plan B Entertainment studios, and four British/Irish producers associated with British film director Danny Boyle.  While this is as racially diverse as Hollywood allows, an industry where black history is almost exclusively projected through an all-white lens, using blacks in front of the camera with whites thoroughly entrenched behind the scenes, much like Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013), although recent low-budget independent films like Fruitvale Station (2013) have attempted to change that perception by showing a day in the life of a young, unarmed black kid eventually shot by police before the night is over, where at the moment it is estimated that police kill a black man, woman, or child every 28 hours.  Nearly half have no weapon on them, or anything resembling a weapon when they are killed, though in more than a third of the cases the police allege the victims displayed a weapon, often disputed by witnesses on the scene, as only 18% (less than one in five) are actually armed.  Blacks are arrested at nearly 3 times the rate of other Americans, while the likelihood of black males going to prison in their lifetime is 28% compared to 4% of white males, and if that black male drops out of high school the number skyrockets to 50%.  While other films like The Central Park Five (2012), In the Land of the Free... (2009), and The Trials of Darryl Hunt (2006) document the lengthy prison terms served by blacks who were wrongfully convicted, according to The National Registry of Exonerations, since 1989 blacks constitute nearly half of all wrongfully convicted cases, where the disparity is greatest in sexual assault cases, as black defendants constitute 25 percent of prisoners incarcerated for rape, but 61 percent of those exonerated for such crimes.  Still, according to a December 31, 2014 article published by the Chicago Reporter, Data: Black Chicagoans at higher risk of being shot by police, Chicago police are 10 times more likely to shoot blacks compared to whites, where the city pays out millions of dollars in damages each year to settle related lawsuits involving police misconduct (specifically $45.5 million from 441 lawsuits between January 2009 and November 2011), most based on excessive force and false arrest allegations, where a third of these cases involve repeat police offenders, with 4 out of 5 of them retaining their jobs, as rarely are members of the police force found culpable. 

With this in mind, SELMA is not a new radical approach in cinema, but seems more instrumental in becoming a teaching moment to reacquaint a new generation of viewers to this recent chapter in Civil Rights history, a timely look back, drawing parallels into our modern world, using the Spielberg model of emotional manipulation in an attempt to hook the most amount of viewers.  Spielberg is a contentious director to cineastes and art film devotees as the measure of his success has largely come in dollars and cents instead of artistic accolades, where he has always ridden the wave of convention instead of carving out new roads.  Spielberg always associated his historical dramas like AMISTAD (1997) and Lincoln (2012) with teaching moments, which included handing out educational materials with the release of his films, much like blockbuster films use merchandising.  Similarly, pamphlets and free educational materials have been made available to the teaching community with the release of this film, where the director Ana DuVernay has indicated the film is a teaching tool that she hopes will trigger curiosity in students, though she cautions that the film condenses 13 years into 120 minutes, where she hopes educators will fill in the history gaps in classrooms nationwide.  The film is not without controversy, however, as President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), after an early career voting against racial equality became a strong proponent who helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but was more interested in advancing his War on Poverty agenda that he introduced in his January 1964 State of the Union address and felt the time was not yet right for Selma or voting rights, believing this could undermine the southern votes needed for passing his own legislation.  While taped conversations between King and Johnson confirm that the President supported King’s cause, many watching the film will assume that Johnson was an obstacle for civil rights leaders, as the film shows Johnson meeting with King ahead of time and is adamantly against his intentions to march in Selma, fearing it could lead to a bloodbath, while also well aware of the divisive racial power of voting rights in the South, that passage of the bill would for all intensive purposes hand the mostly Democratic South over to the Republicans for generations to come (which indeed it has).  The film actually demonizes Johnson, suggesting he attempted to sabotage King’s efforts in Selma by endorsing the dirty tricks of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker) to discredit King and his wife, where the timeline of the movie events are set by FBI agent surveillance reports where King and his supporters are referred to as agitators and black militants. While Johnson certainly had access to these files and no doubt listened to FBI tapes (as do all Presidents), there is no evidence suggesting Johnson directed or controlled the sinister and malicious actions of J. Edgar Hoover and his illegal spy operation known as COINTELPRO.  The FBI campaign to discredit and destroy King was marked by extreme personal vindictiveness, where as early as 1962 Hoover himself penned an FBI memorandum, “King is no good,” claiming he was “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”  Shortly afterwards in 1963, Time magazine chose King as the “Man of the Year,” and later in October 1964 at the age of thirty-five he won the Nobel Peace Prize, at the time the youngest recipient to ever win the award, an honor which elicited Hoover’s comment calling King the “most notorious liar” in the country.

The opening sequence blends together the FBI smear campaign against King, his trip abroad to receive the Nobel Prize, the racially motivated 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of a Birmingham church in September, 1963 killing four young black girls, and the eerily cruel attempt of Selma resident Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) to register to vote when the white registrar makes the outrageous demand that she name all sixty-seven names of the Alabama county judges before he’ll grant her request, stamping “rejected” on her application.  While highlighting the role of King, the film is not a King biopic, but a snapshot of a particular place and time, a moment in history that still resonates today with astonishing power.  David Oyelowo, a classically trained British-Nigerian actor spent seven years campaigning for the role of Martin Luther King, but Lee Daniels, the original director on the film didn’t believe he was right for the part.  Due to the slowness to materialize, most of the original cast and Daniels eventually left the film project, where it was Oyelowo who suggested Ana DuVernay as the director, as they worked together in an earlier film she directed, MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (2012).  What Oyelowo brings to the role is the familiar cadence of King’s speech that the audience immediately recognizes, while another British-Nigerian actress Carmen Ejogo plays Coretta Scott King, where each bring the required level of dignity and reflection to their relationship, which is tested throughout by continued FBI leaks to King’s wife.  By the time King arrives to Selma with religious leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in January, 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a collection of white and black volunteers, mostly college students, had already been leading a voter registration drive since 1961, having received considerable resistance in their efforts from white county law enforcement officials, where in the summer of 1964, three SNCC workers, James E. Chaney of Mississippi, and Michael H. Schwerner and Andrew Goodman of New York, were killed by white supremacists.  While Selma had a population that was 50 percent black, only 1 percent of the town’s black residents were registered as voters.  King proposed the two organizations work together, combining forces against Selma’s racial intransigence, organizing a series of demonstrations in front of the Dallas County Courthouse, bringing national coverage to their efforts, hoping to build momentum from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to win federal protection for voting rights.  On February 17, protestor Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) was fatally shot by an anonymous Alabama state trooper in a full-out night assault against marchers, events that were not captured by television cameras due to the cover of darkness. 

In response, a protest march from Selma to Montgomery was scheduled for Sunday, March 7, where six hundred marchers assembled in Selma, including Rev. Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce) from SCLC and John Lewis (Stephan James), then SNCC chairman, now a prominent U.S. Congressman from Georgia who has been re-elected nine times since 1986, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge (now a U.S. National Historic Landmark) over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery, the state capitol.  On the other side, however, they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police led by Sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston) who ordered them to turn around.  When the protesters refused, to the cheers of white bystanders the officers shot teargas and charged the crowd on horseback, beating the nonviolent protesters over their heads with Billy clubs, including John Lewis who still bears the scars, knocking several unconscious, including one of the organizers, Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint), a longtime friend of both Martin and Coretta King, where a picture of her lying on the Edmund Pettus Bridge was broadcast around the world, ultimately hospitalizing over fifty people, a day now commonly referred to as Bloody Sunday.  Outraged by the events, King called upon supporters to come to Selma for a second march two days later, where he was encouraged by the outpouring of support from clergy and other sympathizers across the nation, but also warned by the Justice Department to wait until the courts could rule on whether the protesters deserved federal protection, as Alabama Governor George Wallace (Tim Roth) refused to intercede.  Still conflicted, King led the second march on March 9, but after kneeling in prayer he turned the marchers back before crossing the bridge, a momentary pause for mutual reflection.  That night, however, a white group beat and murdered civil rights activist James Reeb (Jeremy Strong), a minister from Boston who heeded King’s call to come to Selma for the second march.  King’s actions exacerbated the tension between SCLC and the more militant SNCC, who were pushing for more radical tactics that would move from nonviolent protest to active opposition against racist leaders and institutions, where in the late 60’s SNCC changed their name and eventually became a black nationalist group advocating black power, where an attempt to align themselves with the Black Panther Party failed, with the organization largely disappearing after that in the early 70’s, where only small local chapters remained.  Several weeks afterwards on March 21, however, the historic final march included federal protection, leading to the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 several months later. 

While the weakness of this film is an uneven script that often stumbles into poor melodrama substituting for history, one of the real surprises is how King is not portrayed “only” as the noble hero, like he’s always been depicted in history lessons or Black History month, but as an ordinary man who takes out the garbage and appreciates a lively conversation over a home-cooked meal, while he’s also a great orator with unique abilities to stand up to extraordinary pressure, whose human flaws are exposed alongside an acknowledgment that the movement under his direction made plenty of mistakes, often paying too high a price by underestimating or miscalculating damaging outcomes.  History is never a perfect picture, but DuVernay does do an impressive job revisiting this unique moment in history, making a compelling case for remembering the hard-earned lessons of the past and learning from those mistakes, as otherwise those same problems are likely to reemerge and haunt future generations.  The film quite clearly demonstrates how a nation’s past shapes its current form, where there seems to be a strong urge among many, including Supreme Court Justices, to dismiss any disadvantage minority groups still have today by ushering in phrases like “that was 60 years ago,” but films like this show that national policies made hundreds of years ago still have consequences that are being felt today.  One can’t talk about race, or even poverty or social injustice, without acknowledging how we arrived at this point in time.  It is essential, therefore, that we examine our own unvarnished history without a Hollywood lens.  The LBJ inaccuracies in the film are no worse than Ben Affleck’s intentional distortion of the truth in Argo (2012), dismissing the role of the Canadians and once again creating a fictitious version of Hollywood heroism, yet that film won the Academy Award for Best Picture.  In American Sniper (2014), audiences are clearly willing to whitewash history in the Hollywood style and overlook the racist component of the American soldier in their zealous rush to support our troops and label the film heroic and patriotic, while in SELMA it’s a much harder sell to stare into the face of American racism and see how it impacts upon our lives today.  In attempting to be honest about history, whatever SELMA may be, it’s not the condensed or sanitized version that Argo and American Sniper are, fictitious Hollywood films that feed into a false mythological impression of America.  The disinterest in SELMA at the Cineplex suggests America is not yet interested in reliving the past or in addressing the message of racism while instead preferring movies with a toned down and mostly white Hollywood view.  Yet only by conscientiously acknowledging our past and seeing how it shapes the present do we have any hope of understanding the myriad of complex racial problems that continue to plague us in the present.