A Performance versus a Presidency: The Danger of “Selma”

 

Hollywood continues to unintentionally confirm the late Gore Vidal’s assertion that “We are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

The latest example of this phenomenon involves the film “Selma,” where, for purposes of dramatic tension, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Lyndon Baines Johnson (“LBJ”) are adversaries.

And yet, history proves the two were, in fact, allies in their joint ambition for Congress to protect and advance the civil rights of minorities.

As filmgoers, we should expect creative license and nuanced depictions of complex figures. “Selma” is a movie, after all, not a documentary; but changing the accuracy of events – erasing their existence altogether – so things can more smoothly follow a falsified three-act structure is an assault against the truth.

Rather than giving us the president as he was, perhaps the only president who could, in his televised signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, bring so many public figures of so many different rivalries and hatreds together in the same room, we have a risk-averse boor.

Never mind the power of such a personality, which could will the likes of then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (representing a half-dozen members of his family), Senators Hubert H. Humphrey and Everett Dirksen, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Dr. King, and hand these men the commemorative pens that Johnson used to enact this monumental bill.

Cast aside, too, the president’s special message before Congress on March 15, 1965, where he says the words of that old Negro spiritual:

“WE SHALL OVERCOME.”

The president continues:

“The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American.”

Those are the not words of an opportunist; this is not the language of a cautious enforcer of the status quo.

So profound is President Johnson’s sacrifice, and so spiteful is the response to his speech by Southern Democrats, that he knowingly forfeits his electoral fortune to Republicans and endures the fury of every segregationist politician from his own party.

“Selma” also does Dr. King a disservice by changing events with such abandon. It introduces our current generation of teens and college students to an actor (David Oyelowo) charged with an impossible mission: To convincingly embody the spirit of America’s greatest orator since Franklin Roosevelt and our greatest public writer since Abraham Lincoln.