January 14, 2015
M ARTIN L UTHER K ING J R .
2015 special edition
Riveting and Inspiring
continued
from front
challenges of telling stories of the
Civil Rights Movement include that
the work is not finished, but we want
to believe that it is. Fifty years after
the events depicted in this film, there
have not been biopics of black lead-
ers of the movement, and most of
the film treatments of the subject
have been told from the perspective
of white characters. Even non-film
celebrations of Dr. King’s legacy
tend to focus on him to the exclu-
sion of other leaders and to cel-
ebrate his oratory divorced from the
context of his words.
But social justice movements are
not born of single heroes. They
always depend on the actions of
scores of brave individuals—real
people who alternate between fear
and courage, between clarity and
confusion—who take courageous
action with no hope of recognition
and no assurance of success. Lead-
ers work among other leaders, and
they make mistakes too. They may
neglect their families, or minimize
the contributions of marginalized
members of their own group. Yet
those same leaders also have mo-
on Bloody Sunday), DuVernay
evokes the experiences of scores of
individual citizens who sacrificed
their bodies and sometimes their
lives, all without recognition or re-
ward. She helps you recognize the
fear and trauma that these people,
their ancestors, and their descen-
dents carry in their bodies. This is
their story.
Though the film is not strictly
about Dr. King, it depicts him, too,
as a flesh-and-blood man gifted with
uncommon courage and anointed
with the power to inspire, but also as
a man whose burdens were too
heavy, who was too often away
from his family, and who sometimes
failed those close to him. The film
helps you recognize how remark-
able it was for any man, and particu-
larly one so young, to shoulder the
weight of responsibility that Dr.
King carried, and the burden of that
anointing. And by opening with his
Nobel Peace Prize ceremony and
moving directly into scenes of life-
and-death struggle in Alabama that
occurred in the three months that
followed, the film captures how the
life of a great leader is likely to be
filled with moments of applause and
PHOTO COURTESY P ARAMOUNT P ICTURES
A scene from the new motion picture ‘Selma,’ starring David
Oyelowo (left) as the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King
Jr., Andre Holland as Andrew Young, and Stephan James as
John Lewis.
ments of clarity, and their disagree-
ments may help them to fumble to-
ward bold strategies that succeed
despite long odds. Director
DuVernay works from a place of
understanding these truths, and her
position of relative disadvantage as
a woman of color working in the film
industry can only have helped her
to grasp them.
The result is a film that is uncom-
monly wise. Though it cannot tell all
their stories, it recognizes people
around Dr. King who contributed to
the movement’s shape and strategy
(Ralph Abernathy, Diane Nash,
James Bevel, Hosea Williams, An-
drew Young, John Lewis, Amelia
Boynton Robinson) or who laid
down their lives or suffered serious
injuries in the struggle (Lewis,
Robinson, Jimmie Lee Jackson).
And in depicting scenes of violence
(the bombing of the Birmingham
church where four schoolgirls were
killed, the unprovoked and brutal
violence against black protestors
peril, sometimes in the same week,
and how each victory often comes
with renewed struggle.
The controversy that has arisen
about the film’s historical accuracy
reveals some things about the diffi-
culty of telling stories like the ones
depicted here. President Johnson’s
top domestic aide, Joseph Califano,
urged people in a December Wash-
ington Post op-ed to boycott the
film because it failed to give Presi-
dent Johnson due credit for sup-
porting and even devising the pro-
tests in Selma which led to passage
of the Voting Rights Act. For the
truth, he said, people should read
Califano’s own reports. A number
of other critics and commentators,
even while admiring other aspects
of the film, have fallen into line with
the view that the film unfairly shorts
President Johnson of credit for the
strategy employed by Dr. King and
other black leaders in Alabama.
I feel like I saw a different film
than these critics did. The picture
PHOTO COURTESY P ARAMOUNT P ICTURES
David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. in ‘Selma,’ a riveting
biopic about the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery,
Alabama, and some of the pivotal moments in civil rights
history to secure equal voting rights for African Americans.
that emerged for me was that
Johnson wanted legislation on
voting rights, but didn’t think it
could be accomplished as quickly
as black leaders wanted and was
intent on pursuing his Great Soci-
ety programs first. To suggest that
Johnson was the architect of the
high-risk, non-violent resistance
that ended up being necessary to
arouse the momentum for such
legislation, especially given that
the participants received no fed-
eral protection and that the ra-
cially-motivated violence against
them went entirely without re-
dress, makes no sense and is trou-
bling in ways that Califano and
others don’t even appear to no-
tice. At the very least, when a
powerful person who is part of the
dominant culture demands that
only he gets to tell the story, how
can we trust the truth of the story
he tells? The truth is generally a
lot messier, and getting at it al-
Page 41
ways requires making space for
more voices.
The voices we can hear in
“Selma” have not been given
nearly the airing they deserve. A
historical film will always reflect
some compromises borne of ev-
erything from the difficulty of
capturing what was true to the
challenges of getting a film made
at all; the question is only what
drives those compromises and
how faithfully the film manages to
portray what is most deeply true.
In this case, for example,
DuVernay could not get rights to
Dr. King’s actual speeches (they
are held by another studio for an-
other project), so she sought to
capture their essence in other ways.
Yet in capturing Dr. King’s essence,
and in depicting the work and sac-
rifices of countless others,
DuVernay and Oyelowo and so
many others involved with this soul-
ful project have managed to keep
their eyes on the prize, and have
captured what is true more than
what is accurate. The result is a
transporting vision of what progress
looked like in a particular time, with
some wisdom for those of us who
need it to face the challenges that
continue to plague us.
Darleen Ortega is a judge on the
Oregon Court of Appeals and the
first woman of color to serve in that
capacity. Her movie review column
Opinionated Judge appears regu-
larly in The Portland Observer. You
can find her movie blog at
opinionatedjudge.blogspot.com.