Selma Movie Analysis
The Marches in Selma
Elisabetta Giraudi
Dr. Marisha Caswell
HIST 2907
March 19th 2015
The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, was a time of change in the United States of America. It marked the beginning of a long battle against systematic oppression against black Americans — a battle that to this day is still raging in America as seen in the recent events of Ferguson, Missouri. The Civil Rights Movement encompassed many demonstrations and nonviolent protests whose goals were to end segregation, discrimination and to ultimately gain equal rights. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Daisy Bates, just to name a few, became famous human rights activist during this time, leading some of the movements most memorable and effective …show more content…
demonstrations. Among these demonstrations were the three marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, which led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a game changing victory for the Civil Rights Movement. Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, portrays the three marches across the bridge. This essay will focus on the importance of the marches Selma, what they accomplished, and how effectively the movie portrayed this importance. Although there had been many tries for equal rights beforehand, the starting of the Civil Rights Movement can be placed in 1954, when the Brown v. Board of Education took place and invalidated the ‘separate but equal’ decree.1 Segregation in the classroom was now illegal and found to be unconstitutional. This was just the starting line for the movement. While equal opportunity to education was truly an important victory, there was still much more to gain, and much to lose. In spite of the fact that the civil rights movement was a nonviolent protest, there was a heavily violent push from people who believed that the white American man was superior to others. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) were formed to violently stop the demonstrations. Black Americans and others that fought for equality were targeted and either suffered beatings or killed. Anti-equality organizations even went as far as to bomb a black American Church, killing four young black girls. Despite the continuous hatred received from many white Americans, the Civil Rights Movement was still able to build momentum, and repeatedly won many fights. The Montgomery bus boycott, for example, was a yearlong battle, beginning with Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her seat to a white man. Her arrest led to a full boycott of the bus by black Americans. Edythe Scott Bagley wrote that black American, “college students walked and thumbed rides. Working people took cabs, rode in private cars, rode mules, or walked.”2 This successful tactic was the idea of a young Martin Luther King, Jr., who led the protests.
The film, Selma, starts with the most recent history before the events in Selma. It begins with King receiving his Nobel Peace Prize and giving a speech respecting the many deaths of black Americans and how they have paved the way for the movement. During the speech the scene cuts to the death of the four young girls in the bombing of Birmingham Church. This was a clever way to engage the audience and truly place the idea that there was mindless violence against black Americans, and often against those who were not directly connected to the movement, although, there was still plenty of violence towards the activists. It also alludes to one of the reasons King went to Selma, and how the deaths of these young girls pushed the Civil Rights Movement.
The right for black Americans to vote had been law since 1870, under the 15th Amendment to the Constitution; however, there were a slew of other laws and regulations to stop this from happening. For example, Alabama, “instituted a literacy test that excluded nearly all blacks for more than a half century.”3 A black American also needed support from another registered citizen, and could be asked questions about the Constitution or the government and was expected to answer correctly. Some questions were as radical as naming the sixty-seven county judges in Alabama. Even with everything in order, it was not guaranteed that the black registrar would be accepted. Like Annie Cooper played by Oprah Winfrey, in Selma, many black Americans tried several times to register with no avail. Attempting to register as a black voter in Selma was an uphill battle, Gary May wrote that, “During the past decade only seventy-five blacks – twenty-eight of them college graduates – had tried to register, and all had failed; this in a county where fifteen thousand were eligible to vote”4. Not only were there laws to stop black Americans from voting, but white citizens also intimidated those prospective voters, boasting that any black person who tried would be killed.
There had been activist groups in Selma before hand, however, as Rev. Bernard LaFayette Jr., a leader in the marches, stated in an interview, “No group could do anything in Selma…there was no room for change in the white society.”5 It was a scary time and place; black Americans in Selma were very limited in the actions they could take to rebel against the system. It was a very small town, where everyone knew everyone, and so it was not hard for the people in power in the town to shut down any attempt to rebel or protest. Racists in Selma were different then in other parts of America, in the sense that instead of outright bombing churches to get what they wanted, they would attack family members of activist instead. Rev. Bernard LaFayette Jr., continued in his interview that, “if I went to the mass meeting, okay, they wouldn’t come after me all the time. They would go and fire my mother-in-law from her job”6. Even when there was a push for more black Americans to vote, “obstacles kept black registration at a tiny level despite months of civil rights agitation”7 Martin Luther King Jr. came to Selma on the request of the Voters League, “King accepted their challenge in part because a voter registration drive among the state’s 500,000 unregistered blacks would memorialize the four Birmingham girls murdered in their church.”8
There were many demonstrations in Selma leading to the marches across the bridge to Montgomery; these were pivotal to getting media attention. Without media attention, many of the demonstrations and protests would have failed. King led nonviolent protests, however if the opposing force (the police) were violent and reporters witnessed this violence, then the movement would be in the morning paper and again in the evening news. This was King’s plan to get the President’s attention to the need for a federal voter registration law. In Selma, Ava DuVernay shows the audience the difference between how the police acted when the watchful eye of the media was present versus when it was not. Unlike in Albany, where Sheriff Laurie Pritchett was very much in control and arrested the activist in a nonviolent manner, the Sheriff in Selma fit in the Bull Connor, the Sheriff in Birmingham, mold — meaning he was, “a big ignorant bully”.9 While King was arrested in Selma, the black citizens assembled a night march in Marion, a town twenty miles away. There was hardly any media coverage, and the cameras that were there were sprayed with black paint by local whites that also beat the reporters. During this march the streetlights were shut off and fifty state troopers attacked. “One eyewitness said that the trooper ‘beat people at random…All you had to do was be black’.”10 This horrifying ambush resulted in the injury of many and the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, “the first person to die in an SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] campaign”.11 Jackson was a civil rights activist, and had attended all the marches and demonstrations in Selma, so the local black community was enraged by his death.
Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death ultimately led to the first attempted march from Selma to Montgomery. Local activists wanted to bring Jackson’s body and put it on the capitol steps. The march was also a perfect way to, “dramatize the need for a federal voter registration law”12. This march was a five-day trek, and was risky. As seen before, the police enforcement in Selma were violent, and they were sure to have a plan for the march as the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, did not want, “a bunch of niggers walking along a highway in this state”13. With the risks in mind, King gave a speech before the march saying, “I can’t promise that you won’t get beaten; I can’t promise you won’t get your house bombed; I can’t promise that you won’t get scarred up a bit, but we must stand up for what’s right.”14 The March took place on Sunday, March 7th, 1965, without King, as it was SCLC strategy for leaders to avoid arrest.
Hosea Williams and John Lewis were asked to lead the march in his absence. 525 demonstrators marched from Brown Chapel to Edmund Pettus Bridge. There was, like expected, a blockade of troopers, armed with nightsticks and gas masks, and unknown to the marchers, there were also mounted troopers hidden out of sight. After a short warning to the protestors from major John Cloud the troopers and policemen rushed forward and attacked. It was the, “most savage police riot of the civil rights era.”15 This was violence like never seen before, “after the police blinded the marchers with tear gas, sheriff Clark’s postmen rode their horses into the foggy fray and clubbed them. One postman swung a rubber tube wrapped with barbed wire.”16
Ava DuVernay did not hold back during this scene in Selma, the movie truly captured the horror of Bloody Sunday, focusing on individuals being beaten and chased. By the end of the night fifty-seven black Americans were being treated for injuries like broken teeth, head gashes and broken bones. It was a horrifying night; veterans from WWII said that even the Germans were kinder than the troopers of Alabama. However, it made news all over America. TV stations interrupted popular shows to give news updates on the events, and to flash “the savagery of ‘Bloody Sunday’”.17 These images and new reports infuriated both black and white Americans; they held protests in eighty cities, and sent petitions to the White House to end the violence. This was exactly the type of media attention the movement needed, and as a result hundreds of clergymen came to Selma, answering King’s call to join a ministers’ march. With more marchers and more reason, King decided to march again on March 9th, 1965, and this time he would march together with everyone else.
The second march to take place in Selma was a publicity stunt. However, with more than double the original number of marchers demanding that the march go on, King and other leaders of the Selma protests were caught in a bind because it was ruled that a march that big would disturb traffic on the highway. Leroy Collins, a former governor of Florida, was sent by the President to delay the march until it could be made legal, and ended up negotiating with Sheriff Clark and Major Cloud not to attack the marchers if they turned around on the bridge. On that day, King and the other 1450 marchers were stopped on the bridge, and then were surprised by troopers that had moved out of the way, allowing the march to continue. This was a trap of sorts, Wallace wanted to make a joke of the march and its struggles by just letting them through, and having it broadcasted. Bruce J. Dierenfield wrote that, “suspecting a trap, King stuck to the agreement and asked his flabbergasted followers to return to Brown Chapel. As the marchers retreated, they sang, ‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round.”18 That day’s events had awakened the racists in Selma - they attacked white ministers asking, “you want to know what it’s like to be a real nigger?”,19 before beating them. James Reeb, a 38 year-old white clergyman was attack that night and died. His death received national attention; much more attention then the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, “Thousands of clergymen, teachers, and students headed to ‘Hate City, USA’ to demand black voting rights, the cause for which Reeb sacrificed his life.”20 With the intense out cry, the President gave a speech to Congress and the 70 million people watching the address on television stating that the protests in Selma were as important to America as the American Revolution and the Civil War and that, “their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”21 The judge that had originally banned the march now allowed it to proceed, and on March 21, 1965, 3200 black and white Americans joined together to walk the fifty-four miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
The march as portrayed in the film, Selma, was a smooth operation. In reality, the march was tough, and not an easy task. Marchers walked a little more than ten miles a day, and endured the racist comments and actions of white on lookers. Some even rode their car down the highway with Confederate flags, and obscene symbols and gestures, Bruce J. Dierenfield writes that, “a car cruised by with painted signs on its doors: ‘CHEAP AMMO HERE’ and ‘OPEN SEASON ON NIGGERS.’”22 Even through all of these annoyances, the marchers kept their spirits up by singing songs, chanting and praying. Heschel, a friend of King, wrote a letter reflecting on the march, “the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without word, or march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.”23 For five days these marchers would walk their ten miles, and then set up camp on fields. During the night there were performances by Harry Belafonte, Leonard Bernstein, Billy Eckstine, Nina Simone, Sammy Davis, Jr., and others. Coretta Scott King wrote that the performers “put on a spectacular show for the marchers. I remember how dark it was, except for the lighted platform.”24 By the end of the five-day trek to Montgomery the marchers were exhausted but excited for the end. People from all over the country were traveling to Montgomery to join the finale of the march. “We were fifty thousand people in all, by the time everyone go there…they represented every race, religion, and class. They knew there were risks, but a genuine love of justice drove them on and a human torrent of brotherhood engulfed the ‘Cradle of the Confederacy.’”25 The film portrayed the march using both scenes acted out and real footage from the march in 1965. The use of real footage breaks the camera lens of the viewer. Instead of just experiencing the acting, something that although can be very touching, can also be detached from, the viewer is now seeing real people marching for a real cause. In this way, the film Selma, truly and effectively emphasizes the importance of the movement.
As the march made its way into Montgomery many of King’s old friends and family joined in the march. Finally they came to their stage, where King gave a superb speech in which he said,
I stand before you this afternoon with the conviction that segregation in Alabama is on its death bed…We are in the move now, and no wave of racism can stop us. Let us march on to the realization of the American dream. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one... we are still in for a season of suffering. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.26
Everything ran smoothly that day. There had been assassination plots against King’s life, and other worries that something dangerous may happen during the march, none of which happened. It was not until the next day that King and other activists were informed of the death of Viola Liuzzo, a white woman, who was murdered for helping the Selma march. Although gruesome, her death pushed the need for a voting rights law further. Five months later, in August, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed; this law banned any tests and/or intimidation that would stop Americans from registering and voting. The film, Selma, was without a doubt an excellent movie.
Although it added some drama between King and his wife, and some other Hollywood scenes, the movie never strayed far from the accounted history. The movie gave the viewers a sense of closeness to the characters, by using special focus on them throughout the film, for example Jimmie Lee Jackson’s grandfather. It also made historical figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. seem more like a human rather than just a historical figure. Selma highlighted the mindless violence used against black Americans, and made connections to current events happening in America now with police brutality and racial profiling. Finally the film broke the camera lens of the viewers by using real footage from the last march to Montgomery. The three marches from Selma to Montgomery Alabama were a vital fight in the Civil Rights Movement. As a result of these marches, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed banning any type of regulation to hinder Americans from registering to vote. Selma overall is an effective film because it stays true to the history, builds connections to the viewer and lastly because it makes the viewers think about what happened in the past relative to what is happening in the
present.
Work Cited
Bagley, Edythe Scott, and Joseph Hilley H. Desert Rose: The Life and Legacy of Coretta
Scott King. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012.
Dierenfield, Bruce J. The Civil Rights Movement; Revised Edition. Harlow, England:
Pearson Education Limited, 2013. eBook
King, Coretta Scott. My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1969.
LaFayette Jr, Rev. Bernard, interview by Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Library,
Emory University, Youtube: https://youtu.be/5DIgXcU1YaA, December 3, 2013.
(30:57)
May, Gary. Bending Toward Justice: the Voting Rights Act and the transformation of
American democracy. New York: Basic Books, 2013. eBook.
Rieder, Jonathan. The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of
Martin Luther King, Jr..Massachuetts: The Belknap Press of Harvad University
Press, 2008
Selma. Directed by Ava DuVernay. Produced by Christian Colson, Dede Gardner, Jeremy
Klenier, and Oprah Winfrey. 127 minutes. Plan B Entertainment. 2014. (31:58)
Elisabetta Giraudi
Dr. Marisha Caswell
HIST 2907
March 19th 2015
The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, was a time of change in the United States of America. It marked the beginning of a long battle against systematic oppression against black Americans — a battle that to this day is still raging in America as seen in the recent events of Ferguson, Missouri. The Civil Rights Movement encompassed many demonstrations and nonviolent protests whose goals were to end segregation, discrimination and to ultimately gain equal rights. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Daisy Bates, just to name a few, became famous human rights activist during this time, leading some of the movements most memorable and effective …show more content…
demonstrations. Among these demonstrations were the three marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, which led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a game changing victory for the Civil Rights Movement. Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, portrays the three marches across the bridge. This essay will focus on the importance of the marches Selma, what they accomplished, and how effectively the movie portrayed this importance. Although there had been many tries for equal rights beforehand, the starting of the Civil Rights Movement can be placed in 1954, when the Brown v. Board of Education took place and invalidated the ‘separate but equal’ decree.1 Segregation in the classroom was now illegal and found to be unconstitutional. This was just the starting line for the movement. While equal opportunity to education was truly an important victory, there was still much more to gain, and much to lose. In spite of the fact that the civil rights movement was a nonviolent protest, there was a heavily violent push from people who believed that the white American man was superior to others. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) were formed to violently stop the demonstrations. Black Americans and others that fought for equality were targeted and either suffered beatings or killed. Anti-equality organizations even went as far as to bomb a black American Church, killing four young black girls. Despite the continuous hatred received from many white Americans, the Civil Rights Movement was still able to build momentum, and repeatedly won many fights. The Montgomery bus boycott, for example, was a yearlong battle, beginning with Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her seat to a white man. Her arrest led to a full boycott of the bus by black Americans. Edythe Scott Bagley wrote that black American, “college students walked and thumbed rides. Working people took cabs, rode in private cars, rode mules, or walked.”2 This successful tactic was the idea of a young Martin Luther King, Jr., who led the protests.
The film, Selma, starts with the most recent history before the events in Selma. It begins with King receiving his Nobel Peace Prize and giving a speech respecting the many deaths of black Americans and how they have paved the way for the movement. During the speech the scene cuts to the death of the four young girls in the bombing of Birmingham Church. This was a clever way to engage the audience and truly place the idea that there was mindless violence against black Americans, and often against those who were not directly connected to the movement, although, there was still plenty of violence towards the activists. It also alludes to one of the reasons King went to Selma, and how the deaths of these young girls pushed the Civil Rights Movement.
The right for black Americans to vote had been law since 1870, under the 15th Amendment to the Constitution; however, there were a slew of other laws and regulations to stop this from happening. For example, Alabama, “instituted a literacy test that excluded nearly all blacks for more than a half century.”3 A black American also needed support from another registered citizen, and could be asked questions about the Constitution or the government and was expected to answer correctly. Some questions were as radical as naming the sixty-seven county judges in Alabama. Even with everything in order, it was not guaranteed that the black registrar would be accepted. Like Annie Cooper played by Oprah Winfrey, in Selma, many black Americans tried several times to register with no avail. Attempting to register as a black voter in Selma was an uphill battle, Gary May wrote that, “During the past decade only seventy-five blacks – twenty-eight of them college graduates – had tried to register, and all had failed; this in a county where fifteen thousand were eligible to vote”4. Not only were there laws to stop black Americans from voting, but white citizens also intimidated those prospective voters, boasting that any black person who tried would be killed.
There had been activist groups in Selma before hand, however, as Rev. Bernard LaFayette Jr., a leader in the marches, stated in an interview, “No group could do anything in Selma…there was no room for change in the white society.”5 It was a scary time and place; black Americans in Selma were very limited in the actions they could take to rebel against the system. It was a very small town, where everyone knew everyone, and so it was not hard for the people in power in the town to shut down any attempt to rebel or protest. Racists in Selma were different then in other parts of America, in the sense that instead of outright bombing churches to get what they wanted, they would attack family members of activist instead. Rev. Bernard LaFayette Jr., continued in his interview that, “if I went to the mass meeting, okay, they wouldn’t come after me all the time. They would go and fire my mother-in-law from her job”6. Even when there was a push for more black Americans to vote, “obstacles kept black registration at a tiny level despite months of civil rights agitation”7 Martin Luther King Jr. came to Selma on the request of the Voters League, “King accepted their challenge in part because a voter registration drive among the state’s 500,000 unregistered blacks would memorialize the four Birmingham girls murdered in their church.”8
There were many demonstrations in Selma leading to the marches across the bridge to Montgomery; these were pivotal to getting media attention. Without media attention, many of the demonstrations and protests would have failed. King led nonviolent protests, however if the opposing force (the police) were violent and reporters witnessed this violence, then the movement would be in the morning paper and again in the evening news. This was King’s plan to get the President’s attention to the need for a federal voter registration law. In Selma, Ava DuVernay shows the audience the difference between how the police acted when the watchful eye of the media was present versus when it was not. Unlike in Albany, where Sheriff Laurie Pritchett was very much in control and arrested the activist in a nonviolent manner, the Sheriff in Selma fit in the Bull Connor, the Sheriff in Birmingham, mold — meaning he was, “a big ignorant bully”.9 While King was arrested in Selma, the black citizens assembled a night march in Marion, a town twenty miles away. There was hardly any media coverage, and the cameras that were there were sprayed with black paint by local whites that also beat the reporters. During this march the streetlights were shut off and fifty state troopers attacked. “One eyewitness said that the trooper ‘beat people at random…All you had to do was be black’.”10 This horrifying ambush resulted in the injury of many and the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, “the first person to die in an SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] campaign”.11 Jackson was a civil rights activist, and had attended all the marches and demonstrations in Selma, so the local black community was enraged by his death.
Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death ultimately led to the first attempted march from Selma to Montgomery. Local activists wanted to bring Jackson’s body and put it on the capitol steps. The march was also a perfect way to, “dramatize the need for a federal voter registration law”12. This march was a five-day trek, and was risky. As seen before, the police enforcement in Selma were violent, and they were sure to have a plan for the march as the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, did not want, “a bunch of niggers walking along a highway in this state”13. With the risks in mind, King gave a speech before the march saying, “I can’t promise that you won’t get beaten; I can’t promise you won’t get your house bombed; I can’t promise that you won’t get scarred up a bit, but we must stand up for what’s right.”14 The March took place on Sunday, March 7th, 1965, without King, as it was SCLC strategy for leaders to avoid arrest.
Hosea Williams and John Lewis were asked to lead the march in his absence. 525 demonstrators marched from Brown Chapel to Edmund Pettus Bridge. There was, like expected, a blockade of troopers, armed with nightsticks and gas masks, and unknown to the marchers, there were also mounted troopers hidden out of sight. After a short warning to the protestors from major John Cloud the troopers and policemen rushed forward and attacked. It was the, “most savage police riot of the civil rights era.”15 This was violence like never seen before, “after the police blinded the marchers with tear gas, sheriff Clark’s postmen rode their horses into the foggy fray and clubbed them. One postman swung a rubber tube wrapped with barbed wire.”16
Ava DuVernay did not hold back during this scene in Selma, the movie truly captured the horror of Bloody Sunday, focusing on individuals being beaten and chased. By the end of the night fifty-seven black Americans were being treated for injuries like broken teeth, head gashes and broken bones. It was a horrifying night; veterans from WWII said that even the Germans were kinder than the troopers of Alabama. However, it made news all over America. TV stations interrupted popular shows to give news updates on the events, and to flash “the savagery of ‘Bloody Sunday’”.17 These images and new reports infuriated both black and white Americans; they held protests in eighty cities, and sent petitions to the White House to end the violence. This was exactly the type of media attention the movement needed, and as a result hundreds of clergymen came to Selma, answering King’s call to join a ministers’ march. With more marchers and more reason, King decided to march again on March 9th, 1965, and this time he would march together with everyone else.
The second march to take place in Selma was a publicity stunt. However, with more than double the original number of marchers demanding that the march go on, King and other leaders of the Selma protests were caught in a bind because it was ruled that a march that big would disturb traffic on the highway. Leroy Collins, a former governor of Florida, was sent by the President to delay the march until it could be made legal, and ended up negotiating with Sheriff Clark and Major Cloud not to attack the marchers if they turned around on the bridge. On that day, King and the other 1450 marchers were stopped on the bridge, and then were surprised by troopers that had moved out of the way, allowing the march to continue. This was a trap of sorts, Wallace wanted to make a joke of the march and its struggles by just letting them through, and having it broadcasted. Bruce J. Dierenfield wrote that, “suspecting a trap, King stuck to the agreement and asked his flabbergasted followers to return to Brown Chapel. As the marchers retreated, they sang, ‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round.”18 That day’s events had awakened the racists in Selma - they attacked white ministers asking, “you want to know what it’s like to be a real nigger?”,19 before beating them. James Reeb, a 38 year-old white clergyman was attack that night and died. His death received national attention; much more attention then the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, “Thousands of clergymen, teachers, and students headed to ‘Hate City, USA’ to demand black voting rights, the cause for which Reeb sacrificed his life.”20 With the intense out cry, the President gave a speech to Congress and the 70 million people watching the address on television stating that the protests in Selma were as important to America as the American Revolution and the Civil War and that, “their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”21 The judge that had originally banned the march now allowed it to proceed, and on March 21, 1965, 3200 black and white Americans joined together to walk the fifty-four miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
The march as portrayed in the film, Selma, was a smooth operation. In reality, the march was tough, and not an easy task. Marchers walked a little more than ten miles a day, and endured the racist comments and actions of white on lookers. Some even rode their car down the highway with Confederate flags, and obscene symbols and gestures, Bruce J. Dierenfield writes that, “a car cruised by with painted signs on its doors: ‘CHEAP AMMO HERE’ and ‘OPEN SEASON ON NIGGERS.’”22 Even through all of these annoyances, the marchers kept their spirits up by singing songs, chanting and praying. Heschel, a friend of King, wrote a letter reflecting on the march, “the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without word, or march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.”23 For five days these marchers would walk their ten miles, and then set up camp on fields. During the night there were performances by Harry Belafonte, Leonard Bernstein, Billy Eckstine, Nina Simone, Sammy Davis, Jr., and others. Coretta Scott King wrote that the performers “put on a spectacular show for the marchers. I remember how dark it was, except for the lighted platform.”24 By the end of the five-day trek to Montgomery the marchers were exhausted but excited for the end. People from all over the country were traveling to Montgomery to join the finale of the march. “We were fifty thousand people in all, by the time everyone go there…they represented every race, religion, and class. They knew there were risks, but a genuine love of justice drove them on and a human torrent of brotherhood engulfed the ‘Cradle of the Confederacy.’”25 The film portrayed the march using both scenes acted out and real footage from the march in 1965. The use of real footage breaks the camera lens of the viewer. Instead of just experiencing the acting, something that although can be very touching, can also be detached from, the viewer is now seeing real people marching for a real cause. In this way, the film Selma, truly and effectively emphasizes the importance of the movement.
As the march made its way into Montgomery many of King’s old friends and family joined in the march. Finally they came to their stage, where King gave a superb speech in which he said,
I stand before you this afternoon with the conviction that segregation in Alabama is on its death bed…We are in the move now, and no wave of racism can stop us. Let us march on to the realization of the American dream. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one... we are still in for a season of suffering. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.26
Everything ran smoothly that day. There had been assassination plots against King’s life, and other worries that something dangerous may happen during the march, none of which happened. It was not until the next day that King and other activists were informed of the death of Viola Liuzzo, a white woman, who was murdered for helping the Selma march. Although gruesome, her death pushed the need for a voting rights law further. Five months later, in August, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed; this law banned any tests and/or intimidation that would stop Americans from registering and voting. The film, Selma, was without a doubt an excellent movie.
Although it added some drama between King and his wife, and some other Hollywood scenes, the movie never strayed far from the accounted history. The movie gave the viewers a sense of closeness to the characters, by using special focus on them throughout the film, for example Jimmie Lee Jackson’s grandfather. It also made historical figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. seem more like a human rather than just a historical figure. Selma highlighted the mindless violence used against black Americans, and made connections to current events happening in America now with police brutality and racial profiling. Finally the film broke the camera lens of the viewers by using real footage from the last march to Montgomery. The three marches from Selma to Montgomery Alabama were a vital fight in the Civil Rights Movement. As a result of these marches, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed banning any type of regulation to hinder Americans from registering to vote. Selma overall is an effective film because it stays true to the history, builds connections to the viewer and lastly because it makes the viewers think about what happened in the past relative to what is happening in the
present.
Work Cited
Bagley, Edythe Scott, and Joseph Hilley H. Desert Rose: The Life and Legacy of Coretta
Scott King. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012.
Dierenfield, Bruce J. The Civil Rights Movement; Revised Edition. Harlow, England:
Pearson Education Limited, 2013. eBook
King, Coretta Scott. My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1969.
LaFayette Jr, Rev. Bernard, interview by Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Library,
Emory University, Youtube: https://youtu.be/5DIgXcU1YaA, December 3, 2013.
(30:57)
May, Gary. Bending Toward Justice: the Voting Rights Act and the transformation of
American democracy. New York: Basic Books, 2013. eBook.
Rieder, Jonathan. The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of
Martin Luther King, Jr..Massachuetts: The Belknap Press of Harvad University
Press, 2008
Selma. Directed by Ava DuVernay. Produced by Christian Colson, Dede Gardner, Jeremy
Klenier, and Oprah Winfrey. 127 minutes. Plan B Entertainment. 2014. (31:58)