With another Martin Luther King,
Jr. Day behind us, and nearly a half century after his murder, MLK is again at
the center of racial controversy. This time the uproar centers on the new film Selma, which has been accused of
rewriting history to minimize or exclude white and Jewish partners in the civil
rights movement, and whose black director and lead actor have themselves been
excluded from Oscar consideration.
The critically acclaimed Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay and starring David
Oleyowo in a star-making performance as MLK, focuses on the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches for black voting rights. When the
2015 Oscar nominations were announced recently, Selma nabbed one for Best Picture, but all the individual nominees
were revealed to be white, causing widespread media outrage about a lack of
diversity, particularly in light of expectations about DuVernay and Oleyowo.
Racial ambulance-chaser Al Sharpton
pushed his way to the front of the crowd, calling
for an “emergency meeting” of his diversity task force to consider “action”
against the predominately white voters of the Academy. He called the lack of
nominations a “racial shutout” and declared that “the movie industry is like
the Rocky Mountains – the higher you get, the whiter it gets.”
Sharpton was steamrolling right
over the inconvenient truth that, as Breitbart.com’s John Nolte pointed
out, ten black actors have been
Oscar-nominated in the last five years, and three have won. Seven films
focusing on race and racism have been nominated for Best Picture in that same
time frame. Last year’s Best Picture – selected by the same predominately white
Academy – was 12 Years a Slave. And
then there is Selma’s nomination this
year for Best Picture. In response to the outrage over Selma, the Academy’s President Cheryl Boone Isaacs – who is black –
noted that the film’s Best Picture nod “showcases the talent of everyone
involved in the production of the movie.”
But the Oscar brouhaha wasn’t the
only Selma controversy. It has come under fire for depicting President Lyndon Johnson as a civil rights obstructionist,
which Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library Director Mark Updegrove says “flies in the face of history.” LBJ and MLK had disagreements, Updegrove
asserted, but were partners in the movement.
Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Johnson’s top assistant for domestic affairs
from 1965 to 1969, agrees, writing in the Washington Post that the film takes “trumped-up license”
with the truth and should be “ruled out of awards season”: “Selma was LBJ’s
idea, he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement,
he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted — and he didn’t
use the FBI to disparage him.” Selma’s
director DuVernay responded on Twitter that “LBJ's stall on voting in favor of War on Poverty isn't
fantasy made up for a film.” She told Rolling Stone that the script originally was “much
more slanted to Johnson,” but that “I wasn’t interested in making a
white-savior movie.”
The portrayal of LBJ wasn’t the only cause for charges of inaccuracy
against the film. Leida Snow at the Jewish
Daily Forward pointed out that Selma “distorts history
by airbrushing out” the Jewish contributions to civil rights. “The struggle for
African-American civil rights was primarily one led and suffered by black
Americans,” she wrote. “Nevertheless, white contributions to the ongoing war
against discrimination should be noted.”
She stated that the Selma marches were “built on momentum generated by
thousands of local efforts during the preceding months and years” – among them,
the 1964 Freedom Rides, “in which well over a thousand volunteers, mostly
white, and over half of them Jewish, risked their lives riding into Mississippi
to face intimidation and harassment that included arrests, beatings, and murder.”
And the 1964 murder of black Mississippian James Chaney and two Jewish New
Yorkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, continued Snow, helped lead to
passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Snow noted also that Jews assisted in the founding of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People and more than 2,000 primary
and secondary schools and twenty black colleges. They helped organize the 1963
March on Washington where Rabbi Uri Miller recited the opening prayer and Rabbi
Joachim Prinz spoke before MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. And MLK himself wrote
from prison to his friend Rabbi Israel Dresner, urging him to recruit rabbis to
come to his support, resulting in a huge mass arrest of the rabbis who
responded. Snow concludes that “There were many Jewish and other white
Americans who supported them before, during, and after the marches from Selma
to Montgomery, and ‘Selma’ misses a great teaching moment by excluding them.”
My friend J.E. Dyer at the Liberty Unyielding blog wrote that Selma is unfortunately a
“superficial morality play” that omits the prominent presence in the Selma
marches of Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the best-known rabbis of the 20th
century, and a close friend of MLK. Dyer mentions that Heschel’s daughter “laments
the film’s depiction of events as purely ‘political protest’ and not as a ‘profoundly
religious moment: an extraordinary gathering of nuns, priests,
rabbis, black and white, a range of political views, from all over the
United States.’” By not showing her father marching, she said, the film “is
depriving the viewers of that inspiration.”
All docudramas must, of necessity, make some concessions in historical
accuracy to fit the requirements of storytelling: structure, pacing, invented
dialogue, etc. None is going to be 100% factual. The problem is that Hollywood
has always been the lens through which we all view and interpret not only the
past, but current events, particularly in our time of propagandized education
and increasing disconnect with our own history. The power of cinema is such
that audiences tend to absorb uncritically the images and messages presented
onscreen, and with them, the political perspective of the filmmakers.
Truth is the first casualty of war, it is said, and this is no less true
of the culture war. A critically well-regarded film like Selma – especially in this current, racially charged atmosphere – will
have more impact on how younger generations perceive the civil rights era than
any number of textbooks, documentaries, memoirs, or articles pointing out
historical inaccuracy. All of those are important and necessary weapons, but
ultimately, the war for truth will be won or lost on the cultural battlefield,
and the Selma filmmakers know this.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 1/21/15)
