By Mickey Friedman
January 26, 2015
It’s sad but not unexpected that controversy roils about “Selma.” It is especially sad that the Motion Picture Academy has chosen not to honor the extraordinary work of David Oyelowo, its star, and Ava DuVernay, its director.
Films are made by men and women: they are works of art, not truth. I don’t know the truth of Selma. I only know a bit about my Selma. The time I matched with twenty-five thousand others into the heart of Montgomery, Alabama.
I went because then, as now, black lives matter. Freedom matters. Justice matters. Because it was impossible for me to see the violent vestiges of segregation without being offended on the deepest level.
That some want to make “Selma” about the kindness of the white and powerful is just more of the same unwillingness to confront the sad, painful reality that was America in the nineteen-sixties. Those of us who went to the streets did so because the powerful were so terribly recalcitrant to embrace change. And as “Selma” repeatedly shows the President tried with Hoover’s FBI to stop, control, and even sabotage the civil rights movement. Read about COINTELPRO.
The sad fact is that southern whites would beat, rape, and kill to maintain their power and privilege. And that those entrusted to enforce the Constitutional guarantees of all would gladly turn a blind eye to the daily violation of those rights. Nothing was ever given; everything was taken.
In a very short amount of time, “Selma” presents the many complicated realities that Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council faced in Selma.
At the time of the March on Washington in 1963, my loyalties were with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The film does a fair job acknowledging the tensions between the impatience of the young, and the mature appreciation of nuance and strategy of the more experienced. Of the changing dynamic between King and Malcolm X.
But I was blessed over the years to march with King in Harlem, in Montgomery, to hear him many times, always inspired, and to appreciate him more and more as time went on. As he tried to meld the antiwar and civil rights movements, and moved to occupy Washington, DC.
And while I was never more frightened marching into Confederate-flagged Montgomery, the streets lined with the Alabama National Guard, I was never more inspired marching with those extraordinarily brave people. Especially when we were greeted by the thousands living in the poor black neighborhoods of the capitol, young and old, standing, waving, smiling, in windows. And I can never separate the marching from the singing: “Oh Wallace, you never can jail us all, because Wallace, segregation’s bound to fall … ”
For me there was never any doubt at all as to who had made this happen. Because this was about those without the power to vote, but with the greatest strength and courage imaginable, the black people of Alabama.
And perhaps that’s still so galling to some. That people so disregarded, so disrespected, so mistreated could be so very inspiring. Were, in fact, braver than we were. Were the ones to teach us about freedom. Singing, clapping away the fear.
I have no patience with those complaining on LBJ’s behalf. As “Selma” shows, he wouldn’t use the power to change until the powerless forced his hand. When he said “We Shall Overcome,” he really meant “We Were Overcome.”
Because this was the same Lyndon Johnson who squandered American and Vietnamese lives with impunity. A monstrous mistake that haunts almost all those who fought it. The president who presided over the invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic.
If you are looking for white heroes, look not to the halls of power but to those in the trenches of the labor movement. To the communists and socialists and men and women of faith who organized the working people of the Southern textile mills and coal mines. To a man I wrote a book about, Junius Scales, who risked his life to get white workers to work with black workers, who played a major role in the integration of the University of North Carolina. To those of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee who trained Rosa Parks and many of the organizers of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr.
Imagine if we honored “Selma.” Honored those who risked all to give us another chance at justice. If we cherished that moment when nonviolence prevailed. When people of all colors and of good will were so clearly moved by the horrifying excesses of racism, so shamed by such hatred, we acted. The worst and best of times. And there is so much to be learned if only we look clearly.
It is madness not to see the price we all pay when black lives don’t matter.
So which side are you on?