When Martin Luther King Day rolls around, do you sometimes scratch your head and go, “Why'd he get his own holiday again, exactly?” Some have forgotten, and some never learned what Martin Luther King Jr. did for this country.
And yet when “Selma” debuted in 2015, news headlines regarding race were eerily reminiscent of headlines from 1965. Did we learn anything in 50 years?
To Set the Stage, a Church Bombing
“Selma” opens with King (David Oyelowo) at a 1965 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, five young black girls dressed in their Sunday finest descend a church staircase in the American South. A bomb detonates, killing them all.The film depicts the standard 1960s humiliations suffered by Southern blacks, due to America’s deep-seated and lingering Jim Crow-era prejudice, which for all intents and purposes rendered black people’s constitutional right to vote null and void.
Dr. King’s been in talks with President Lyndon Baines Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) about a protest march meant to hurry the passage of LBJ’s Voting Rights Act that will allow blacks to vote, but the president feels that’s all a bit hasty. He’s more focused on his “War on Poverty,” pointing out that it’s something that would also benefit blacks.
It’s been pointed out that LBJ came up with the poverty idea after touring Appalachia and witnessing the dirt-poor existence of Southern whites there, but that’s another topic.
King’s campaign of civil disobedience lasted three months in 1965, culminating in a nonviolent protest march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital—meant to gas up and turn on the car of President Johnson’s Voting Rights Act.
LBJ wants no part of the march. He’s caught between a rock and a hard place; he’s not stupid, he has foresight and knows King’s stance is the future, and he rather agrees with it (which has been criticized elsewhere as erroneously painting LBJ as a sort of reluctant progressive).
As president, LBJ also needed to take meetings with the openly racist governor of Alabama, George Wallace (Brit actor Tim Roth in fine, arrogant, smarmy form), and his ilk. As LBJ says to MLK, “You’re an activist. I’m a politician.”
King knows that Wallace and other local authorities will probably rain down violence on his intended march and so makes sure there’s a massive media turnout.
The Players
Some of King’s fellow activists are John Lewis (Stephan James), who was, during the making of “Selma,” the only living member of the “Big Six” leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, along with James Bevel (Common), and Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo).Oprah, eschewing Her Winfreyness, gives herself over to the role of nurse Annie Lee Cooper, lending an air of authenticity in serving the cause.
But British actor David Oyelowo is king of—as well as King in—this film, as well as possibly establishing the definitive on-screen portrayal of King to date. He shows us a man, and he shows us why that man is now a legend.
He shows us a man with self-doubt, a man who calls gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in the middle of the night, seeking strength and inspiration from her singing. A conflicted man who loves his wife but wasn’t faithful. A man who sheds tears with the bereft, and a man who enjoys the jokes and friendship of his fellow leaders.
Oyelowo also put on the requisite weight and holds King’s facial gestures to the point of channeling. He’s got King’s speech patterns down, which in their uniqueness border on caricature, or a least stylization, but he never crosses the line. The virtuoso speeches and sermons are explosions of virtue and inspiration. It’s a great feat of theater craft, not to mention the fact that Oyelowo is British.
It’s always a challenge to bring life, let alone high tension, to political wheeling and dealing, but director Ava DuVernay pulls it off.
From the 2020 Perspective
Most people today don’t realize that modern socialism, liberalism, and progressivism are way stations designed specifically by Marx and Engels—solely for the purpose of moving societies, incrementally, à la the proverbial boiling frog—toward communism. When communism finally wraps itself around society’s throat like an “Alien” facehugger, it’s too late.
The 1960s is ancient history, for many reasons. One of those reasons is that the new evil, communism, has come to replace the old evil: the human greed and corruption of the Southern Antebellum and Jim Crow eras of the American past that blacks suffered under.
Watch “Selma” to honor Dr. Martin Luther King’s fight against the evils of African-American history past. Then listen to “How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World” to witness the current fight against communism, and its intent to burn American Democracy to the ground.
