The President's Zinger

"I know because I won both of them."

-Barack Obama

On Appreciating "Selma" and Selma

Monday, Jan 19, 2015 06:00 AM CST

“The plain people who became powerful”: Appreciating MLK anew, between “Selma” & Selma

On the eve of march's 50th anniversary, we’re learning to honor the ordinary people who made him King. Here's how

Joan Walsh Follow

Martin Luther King Jr.; David Oyelowo in "Selma" (Credit: AP/Paramount Pictures)

There may never be another observation of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday with the historical resonance of his 80th, which in 2009 was observed just one day before Barack Obama became our first African-American president. But this year’s King holiday, celebrating his 86th birthday, falls a little more than six weeks before the 50th anniversary of the Selma march, and in the middle of the unfortunate controversy over the movie “Selma.” We’ve got some new historical reverberations worth examining.
I loved Ava DuVernay’s “Selma.” Its pacing is unrivaled. Moving between portraits of quiet intimacy and epic clashes – arguments, marches, beatings, murder – it wakes us up and pulls us in and keeps us rattled and searching until we leave the theater. The violence is jarring but true to the story and never overdone. Spoiler: In a quiet, beautifully lit scene in a church stairwell, you begin to realize you’re listening in on the four little girls murdered in Birmingham in September 1964, but when it comes, the bombing still takes your breath away. It’s as clear a portrait of innocence and evil as I’ve seen.
I loved DuVernay’s King, too: a fuller, richer MLK, the man in his context, supported by family and friends; tired, doubtful, not always leading; sometimes prodded from behind. “Selma” explores the intricate dynamics of the multifaceted civil rights movement – the cautious ministers and the young firebrands. King and Malcolm X. Diane Nash and James Bevel. The wife of a local leader proudly makes lunch for King and the visiting activists, like so many leaders’ wives who went unheralded. In actual news footage from the final Selma march, near the end of the film, actor/activist Harry Belafonte waves to the camera, so young and so crucial. King matters in the film, but Du Vernay is focused on the plain people who became powerful.
But from the day it opened, “Selma” was dogged by complaints about its historical accuracy, particularly its portrait of President Johnson as opposed to King’s Selma campaign and his voting-rights agitation generally. Johnson’s top domestic affairs aide, Joseph Califano, has been relentless and unforgiving, insisting the Selma movement was LBJ’s idea and declaiming, “The movie should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards season.” Califano’s screed reflected the pain of Johnson loyalists who saw their boss’s overall legacy destroyed by his Vietnam escalation. They are determined he get his due when it comes to civil rights. But it’s the embodiment of white entitlement not merely to criticize DuVernay’s film, or to correct the record, but to demand that Selma be “ruled out” for viewership and awards.

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Of course neither LBJ nor MLK chose Selma first – it was the SNCC kids, the great John Lewis and James Forman, who worked with the city’s fed-up black residents – they made up a majority of the city’s residents, but only 2 percent of those eligible had been able to register to vote — who decided enough was enough. They brought along King, and King brought along Johnson; although both men saw the rightness of the cause, they weren’t initially as sure of the time or place.
The controversy is also an echo, 50 years later, of tension between Johnson and John F. Kennedy loyalists. The “Selma” version of Lyndon Johnson is actually a composite of JFK and LBJ. The caution preached to King in the movie would have been more accurate if it came from Kennedy. Johnson’s venerated predecessor was constantly telling King and his allies that they were moving too fast. It wasn’t Johnson, but Kennedy’s brother Robert, who sicc’ed the FBI on King, although Johnson knew about the Bureau’s surveillance. Even historical filmmakers use composite figures sometimes; we’re just not used to them being two illustrious presidents.
You can wish DuVernay stayed more true to the record on Johnson, as I do, and still admire the film. A great movie would have been greater with an accurate portrait of Johnson’s complexity and passion. But I loved the generosity shown by Julian Zelizer, author of the excellent, just-published history, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress and the Battle for the Great Society.” He was able to call the film “stunning,” while noting that it wasn’t entirely “true” to Johnson’s record.
Which brings us to Selma the movement, not the movie, which we’ll celebrate on its 50th anniversary in March. Selma has much to teach us about the real MLK, too. It marked the apex of the peaceful, multiracial civil rights movement, and perhaps the apex of King’s influence, too. Stokely Carmichael and “Black Power” would replace the leadership of John Lewis, who was committed to a biracial organization, at SNCC. Five days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles would explode in nationally televised Technicolor violence (after a police over-reaction), and a rattled white America would back away from the promise of equality Johnson had begun to keep.
King himself was eclipsed by increasing black radicalism, on the one hand, and by his own passionate opposition to the Vietnam War on the other, which split him from lieutenants like Bayard Rustin who thought the focus should remain on civil rights. As we celebrate King’s next few holidays in the context of more big civil rights 50th anniversaries, we’ll be celebrating a man, if we’re honest, whose influence was on the wane, until after he died.
But “Selma” the movie reminds us that Selma represented the power of ordinary black people to change history, 50 years ago. “Selma” is controversial partly because it dispenses with the fictional convention of the white savior, so crucial to successful race movies. But it quietly deposes King as “black savior,” too. Neither LBJ nor MLK liberated the brave black citizens of Selma; they liberated themselves, though there is much more liberation to be achieved.
Their ability to tell their own stories, for instance, lagged far behind their attainment of voting rights. Today a new generation of black artists and writers and filmmakers and critics are telling their own stories. That’s the good news: for some white people, that might be the bad news. But the battle over “Selma” represents a belated new front in the ongoing civil rights struggle, and King would be proud to watch it unfold.

Just Don't Call "Selma" History

Monday, Jan 19, 2015 07:30 AM CST

It’s not just “Selma”: Hollywood’s history problem

Again and again, from "John Adams" to "Lincoln," romantic truthiness supplants historical truth on-screen

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg

Tom Wilkinson as Lyndon B. Johnson, and David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr., in "Selma" (Credit: Paramount Pictures)

 On a recent CBS Sunday Morning, the generally insightful David Edelstein defended the film “Selma.”  He imagined, as one can almost understand, that by reading a biography or two of Lyndon Johnson, he could establish the degree of historical accuracy in this much-heralded Hollywood production.  He reached the conclusion that “90 percent” of the film was accurate.  He was comfortable in stating that the filmmakers’ decision to portray LBJ, for dramatic effect, in a historically irresponsible way–as one who stood opposed to voting rights–was of minor concern only.  Revising the record did not undermine the larger historical message meant to be conveyed by the movie.  Or so Edelstein judged.

But it’s time to stop claiming that films are history when they are stories meant principally to entertain and inspire.  Our point is not to diminish the daring of Dr. King, but to call attention to the claims made by those who credit imaginative filmmakers with the power to capture historical truth–when professional historians are themselves conflicted, even after reading scores of deeply researched texts, listening to White House tapes, and interviewing veterans of the civil rights movement.  We want to understand MLK.  But is this the way?

The King estate refused to give the filmmakers the rights to any of Dr. King’s speeches, a fact that should not go unnoticed.  The writer/director Ava DuVernay–who was (not inconsequentially) trained as a publicist–liberally recast Dr. King’s words after inheriting a complete script composed by the white British screenwriter Paul Webb.  She admits that she did not like how Webb emphasized LBJ’s leadership, and wanted a more African-American-centered story.  At the same time, though, she refuses to believe that she has sacrificed historical truth in her reconstruction of events, recently expressing confidence that she “knew the history” when she embarked on the project.  DuVernay rationalized that because her mother works in Selma today, she is herself somehow–mystically–connected to the city’s past.  In the end, having criticized Webb’s script as a “traditional biopic” that needed revision, she in fact produced a different “traditional biopic” that showed King on his best day instead of Johnson on his. And that is not history.  LBJ intimate Joseph Califano and the LBJ Presidential Library, among others, have pointed out how DuVernay’s vision is badly skewed.

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In a story of this magnitude, living participants will invariably disagree. But are we not supposed to care that there are widely divergent LBJ biographies?  Some revel in his proactive style of governance, while others paint him as an ogre, a crude power-monger, and make claims about his motives that still other historians have proven wrong.  Rather than tackle these core elements of the story, “Selma” offers a singular caricature of Johnson.  Hollywood will not complicate a story by declaring multiple heroes.

Movie scripts of this kind are bound to follow a particular sequence.  Drama unfolds in a well-timed, circumscribed manner, which history does not do.  That is the flaw of “Selma” and like-minded films that compress the past. As brilliant as Daniel Day Lewis’ portrayal of Lincoln was, it focused on a tiny slice of one possible Lincoln, while leaving the desirable impression that Lincoln’s personality was in some way “knowable” to us.  We can like the acting, and feel a sense of communion; that’s art.  But it’s certainly not history.

Of the myriad works by professional historians, the brains behind “Lincoln” gave credit to a derivative book of questionable authority for its inspiration.  “Team of Rivals,” by popularizer (and research outsourcer) Doris Kearns Goodwin, had lifelong Civil War historians grumbling as soon as it was published–which, nevertheless, did nothing to hurt sales.  An earlier example, with race as its subject, is Alex Haley’s blockbuster book and miniseries “Roots.”  To this day, few are aware that for all its success, “Roots” was decisively proven to be a complete concoction by a self-promoting dreamer.  Haley’s outright fantasy of his family’s noble African heritage was, in his mind alone, sustained through acts of will and thoughts of pride over decades of enslavement.  It was a desirable kind of history, easy to champion, but nonetheless a grossly inaccurate one.  There was no evidence that Kunta Kinte was his ancestor

Such abuses are more common than the majority of Americans realize, and they deserve better.  The screenwriter behind HBO’s John Adams miniseries said he based his production on David McCullough’s “John Adams.”  Like fellow bestselling author Goodwin, McCullough was not trained in the discipline of history, nor did he contribute a single new interpretation of any Adams-related event.  The deeply flawed Adams miniseries fictionalized key moments–e.g., Adams cradling the dying African-American martyr Crispus Attucks in his arms after the Boston Massacre, when he wasn’t even there and exhibited none of the modern liberal sentiments we now demand of our forebears when it comes to racial sensitivity; furthermore, the HBO writer used artistic license to bring Dr. Benjamin Rush back from the dead to perform surgery on John and Abigail’s daughter.

Let’s be ironic for a moment.  In a way, “Forrest Gump,” the overtly fictionalized historical caricature, tells it like it really is in Hollywood.  In that film, Tom Hanks’ character is everywhere at the moment history is being made.  Without intending to say so, it is the one film–a melodramatic farce–that captures the reality of how the film industry abuses historical reality while pretending to convey a functional truth.

Despite the fine acting of Paul Giamatti, the award-winning HBO series on the Adamses made John and Abigail into the heroes of a Forrest Gump-like saga.  Where they went, American history followed.  They were the essence of the zeitgeist, as inspired by McCullough’s love-poem of a putative biography.  See the pattern here?  Romantic truthiness supplants history.  Alex Haley plagiarized a part of his book from the work of an anthropologist.  Doris Goodwin admitted to having plagiarized two of her earlier books, too.  Both authors had high-placed friends in the industry; their appealing faces were familiar to TV viewers, and they were allowed to carry on and prosper.  They had talents.  But they never deserved to be hailed for their essential grasp of historical truth.

That’s the legacy we need to contend with when discussing “Selma” today.  It’s not that the film deserves no praise.  The issue is strictly whether we can be honest enough to acknowledge it as Not Exactly History.  Any historian will tell you that great historical moments are not micromanaged by single individuals.  The very idea that David Edelstein sees fit to put a percentage (90 percent!) on the accuracy of this biopic is ludicrous–mind you, our observation is not so much a dig at the CBS critic as it is evidence that we as a society have been reared to believe that “based on actual events” films are approximate representations of historical truth.

If there is a Hollywood film that adheres to historical standards of honesty we can’t think of it.  The very act of making a major studio film leads to distortion.  For one, scripts are obliged to reduce complex moments to a limited number of characters.  They also, simplistically, turn characters into heroes and villains.  Facts are left out in order to make the story fit the operative fable–usually it’s the triumph of humanity, and who doesn’t want to shell out twelve bucks to feel that?   Then, screenwriters are called on to impose a false dramatic climax on the narrative.

 And, lest there be lingering doubt, directors almost never listen to actual historians.  Remember the comic vehicle, “Sweet Liberty” (1986), in which a college professor (Alan Alda) sees his script about a Revolutionary War battle mangled by the filmmakers?  If a director wants to manipulate the story to inject sex or violence into the film (so as to make for a seductive trailer), then historical nuance be damned.  A film is a business investment dependent on audience emotions.  Therefore, it becomes an exercise in myth making.

At one time, viewers thought D.W. Griffith’s deeply racist blockbuster “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) was history; the then critic-in-chief Woodrow Wilson fulsomely praised it.  Griffith inserted historical reenactments into his epic, to give the film the feel of a history lesson.  In 1935, after seeing T”he Scarlet Pimpernel,” an adventure set during the French Revolution, the historian Louis Gottschalk insisted to the screenwriter Samuel Marx: “No picture of a historical nature ought to be offered to the public until a reputable historian has had a chance to criticize and revise it.”  Hollywood was not listening to the reputable historian then, nor is it doing so now.

Special assistant to the president Joseph Califano’s opinion piece in the Washington Post is on target.  He wants to know what’s wrong with Hollywood.  Why, he posed, did the filmmakers think they had a better story than the “true story that didn’t need any embellishment”?  Why did they accuse LBJ of using the FBI to discredit Dr. King?  Why did they “feel no obligation” to track down essential facts?

We love what film can do.  Let’s just accept that Hollywood thinks of something as “great history” that falls well short of being that.  And awards follow.  Let’s label it historical fiction, because that’s what it is.  Remember when TV wrestling wouldn’t admit it was fixed, and the wrestlers wouldn’t admit to being entertainers?  At least we don’t do that anymore.  So why do movie critics go on pretending that screenwriters are expert interpreters of the past?  Not everyone who tells stories–or reads a biography or two–is a historian.  You don’t turn pro after you’ve taken a few tennis lessons.  A film that captures scenes from history can be called “gripping” or “glamorous” or a “romantic” vision of the past, but don’t try to persuade the public that it’s truthful.

 There is no such thing as historical truth by percentages.  If you’ll just stop calling it history, then we pointy-headed historians (and key participants like Califano) will not have to call Hollywood’s bluff.

Robert L. O'Connell - Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman

I give homage to the Northern trinity that won the war: Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman.  What I learned in this biography is not only that Sherman deserves his place in this trinity, but that overall Sherman is one of the greatest and most consequential men of the 19th Century.

Sherman ranged the length and breadth of the US during his time.  In a century when travel could be long and arduous, he seemed to be everywhere.  He spent time in San Francisco as a banker and roamed the countrysides in his military career, but his favorite place seemed to be St. Louis.

It is amazing that Sherman headed a military academy in Baton Rouge when South Carolina seceded.  He had a certain naivete regarding politics.

I was reading flying to SF and I was reading it flying home.

We've got a long way to and a short time to get there.
(1/5 At the Birmingham terminal waiting to board the flight to Houston)

In the Second Seminole War, Sherman wanted a war of extermination.  There is no doubt that Sherman was not an egalitarian and that he headed a US army that exterminated Native Americans on the plains after the war.  P. 20

The author walks a fine line between absolving and holding Sherman accountable as an Indian killer.

Speaking of Grant:

"He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk; now, sir, we stand by each other always."  P. 95

Flying to Houston on my way to SF, reading about "Cump."  It's bumpy over New Mexico like Sherman's bumpy life.  1/5/15

McPherson says that Vicksburg was the most important strategic victory of the war.  P. 122

It's hard for me to visualize Sherman's march to the sea.  P. 156

Grant's battlefield insensitivity.  P. 202

The Bummers.  (1/9 Ready to takeoff in SF)

"You will be satisfied in their utter extermination."  P. 206 (1/9 Leaving SF)

Out the airplane window to my right I see Alcatraz, the City, Oakland, and boats in the bay.  Where is Berkeley?  (1/9/15)

More than three million bison gunned between 1872 and 1874.  Native Americans depended on the buffalo.  These creatures were deliberately destroyed by Sherman and his minions in the effort to exterminate the Indians.  P. 203

These were fellow Americans however misguided.  P. 259

Sherman's Army of the West stole the show at the Grand Review.  P. 264

A mythical 19th century boyhood.  P. 280

An appointment to West Point at age 16 thanks to his foster father. P. 282

The skeptical Cump had trouble with his pious Catholic wife.  (P. 300 1/9 Enroute from Houston to Birmingham)

Sherman perhaps personifies more than anyone 19th century America, the good and the bad.  Should I read more about this complex man?  P. 347

A Review of "Selma"

• By David A. Graham

Selma: MLK in Masterful Microcosm

Director Ava DuVernay wisely focuses her sober, stately film on a few critical months.

Christopher Orr Dec 26 2014, 8:15 AM ET

Paramount Pictures

“Boycotting buses in Montgomery, segregation in Birmingham, now voting in Selma. One struggle ends, just to go on to the next and the next.” The words are uttered by Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) in a stem-winding sermon, but they offer a clue to the underlying logic of director Ava DuVernay’s remarkable film Selma. The movie does not present itself as a biography of its world-renowned protagonist, nor as a history of the movement he led. Rather, it portrays a single brief chapter in the long, ongoing struggle for civil rights, and it does so with exceptional focus and intelligence.
The movie begins with a bit of dramatic sleight-of-hand, interspersing King’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize (which took place in December 1964) with a heartbreaking dramatization of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that had killed four girls in Birmingham the previous year. DuVernay then settles her gaze on the events leading up to three planned marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965—marches that directly led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year.

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Like Lincoln, another film that had the wisdom to tell its tale in microcosm, Selma is the story not only of a man but of a process. In place of the internal horse-trading of the earlier picture, DuVernay’s movie concerns itself with the application of external leverage. Unable to persuade Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to push for a voting bill, King and his fellow leaders in the nonviolent movement turn to the most precious asset they have, their own bodies. The political arithmetic is as precise as it is chilling: If they demonstrate in Selma, they will be beaten, or even killed, by the forces of local Sheriff Jim Clarke and the state police; those beatings will be covered in the papers and on the news; and eventually, the activists hope, the revulsion of everyday Americans will reach a tipping point and force Johnson’s hand.
DuVernay’s film is equally stark and clear-eyed when it comes to the mechanisms used to prevent black Americans from registering to vote across the South: poll taxes, civics tests, the need to be “vouched for” by an existing voter, the publication of one’s name and address in the paper in the event that he or she successfully registers—an invitation to violence. So too, with the political stakes in question, which include not only the right to elect leaders but also to sit on juries—the same juries that, having historically been all-white, consistently acquitted any white man charged with anti-black violence.
If this makes the movie sound like a civics lesson, then I am doing it an injustice. Selma is a film of uncommon power, insight, and even humor. Oyelowo is superb in the central role of King, capturing his famous cadences without ever descending into mimicry. This is a life-sized portrait of a larger-than-life figure, and never more so than in the scenes between King and his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), their marriage strained not only by the ever-present threat of violence but also by his own serial infidelities, which the movie handles with tact but does not shy away from.
The supporting cast is likewise strong, notably Colman Domingo (as Ralph Abernathy), André Holland (as Andrew Young), and Stephan James (as John Lewis), but also Lorraine Toussaint, Wendell Pierce, Jeremy Strong, Common, and Giovanni Ribisi. Cuba Gooding Jr. and Martin Sheen never quite disappear into the minor characters they play, but remarkably Oprah Winfrey (who also produced) does so with utter grace and ease.

King and his fellow leaders in the nonviolent movement turn to the most precious asset they have, their own bodies.

Which brings me to Wilkinson and Tim Roth, who plays Alabama Governor George Wallace. The casting is a touch odd, and both actors take some time to settle into their roles. But crucially neither is trying to do an impression of the character he plays. They allow us to accept them gradually, without falling back on elaborate makeup or twitchy mannerisms, like the disastrous parade of presidential caricatures that populated last year’s The Butler. (Ironically, the director of the latter, Lee Daniels, was originally slated to direct Selma.)
DuVernay is working on a vastly larger scale here than she has before (her previous feature, Middle of Nowhere, was an intimate portrait of a medical student’s struggles when her husband is sentenced to prison), but she does so with extraordinary self-assurance. Whether filming the easy camaraderie of King with his friends, or the tense meetings between his Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or the outright horror of the “Bloody Sunday” police brutality that took placed on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, she and cinematographer Bradford Young are in full control of their vision. The result is a stately, sober film, at times uplifting and at others agonizing. It’s a snapshot of a moment in time that seems both distant from our own, and yet still unbearably too clos

Strange Doings

Having the flu and taking Tamiflu and a strong antibiotic can do strange things to you. I woke up this morning with a vision of seeing Billy Joe about to jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge. I yelled out, "No! Billy Joe. NO!" But he jumped anyway. Over my noontime luncheon nap I was singing hymns with Tennessee Ernie Ford. Now I'm craving deviled eggs and I hate deviled eggs. Having the flu can take some strange turns.

Selma

Trying to decide whether to see the movie.  Not sure if I can take it.