Selma goes into wide release tomorrow, so I'm publishing an expanded version of a December diary I wrote about the film.
Prior to Selma, the last time I cried at a movie was two years ago at the end of Lincoln, watching the free men and women in the House gallery cheering the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. The tears came from my present-day knowledge that over the next 150 years, they and their descendents would face Jim Crow, the Klan, Brown v. Bd. of Educ., the '60s and Civil Rights Laws, the Scottsboro Boys, Martin Luther King, Jr., his assassination, the "Southern Strategy," President Barack Obama and the racist backlash to his election.
Added to that was the recognition that these fights were continuing even in 2012; that even 150 years after 600,000 died, the battle for freedom and civil rights was still raging, even as many, now including the Supreme Court, think it's over.
Two years later, I cried at Selma, not only because of the towering performance of David Oyelowo as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the filmmaker's skill at recreating the drama of the Selma March, the strategy battles within the civil rights camp, the personal struggles of Coretta and Martin and the LBJ-King relationship.*
But like after Lincoln, I was moved by having witnessed the 50 years since the March -- the malignant success of the Southern Strategy, initiated by Nixon and perfected by Reagan (to the extent of beginning his campaign in Philadelphia MS -- a symbol of the murderous opposition to Dr. King and Civil Rights); and the use of that Southern Strategy to divide the working and middle class by race and enable the growth of obscene levels of inequality.
There is even greater resonance and significance to the events of both Lincoln and Selma now than in 2012. Then, the first African American had just been re-elected, despite a four year campaign of unprecedented obstruction. In 2012, a multi-racial, young and rising coalition seemed to have triumphed, heralding a progressive future -- a triumph, after 150 years, of Lincoln's promise.
Just two years later, we are fighting a rear-guard action. Even as states all around the county were passing restrictive Voter ID laws, the Supreme Court ignored a recent near-unanimous vote of Congress and trashed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act -- the Act created by the events of Selma. Without waiting a moment, or having any fleeting thought of what Dr. King would have thought, Texas implemented its blatantly racist Voter ID law. Then, after a trial, a federal judge found the law was a poll tax and otherwise discriminatory. Yet weeks before the election, the Supreme Court refused to stop application of the law to the 2012 election. Since then, we've had the inaction on Brown and Garner and new eruptions of racism.
Charles Pierce invoked the Selma March in a sorrowful, angry piece in October:
There is a long, blue river of sadness running through the words of that dissent. It runs under the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. It pools into a lagoon of sadness behind an earthen dam in Mississippi. The survivors of the generation that fought and bled for the right to vote are getting old and dying off right now. John Lewis is 74. Soon, there won't be any of them left. But it always was thought that the victories they won would survive them.
Three months later, John Lewis is on the
Selma screen, portrayed by Stephan James, marching with Dr. King, priests, rabbis and thousands of others across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
(See last night's Jon Stewart, Daily Show interview with Selma Director Ava DuVernay.)
Here's the last verse of Hey Nelly Nelly, written in 1963 by Shel Silverstein and Jim Friedman:
Hey Nelly Nelly, come to the window.
Hey Nelly Nelly, look at what I see.
I see white folks and colored walking side by side,
Walking in a column that's a century wide,
It's still a long and a hard and a bloody ride
In 1963
I'd nearly forgotten about the song, which I learned from the Judy Collins Songbook in the late '60s. Over the fold is Judy, singing it in 1966.
*I believe the critiques the film on that relationship is more about rival Oscar campaigns than supposed revisionist history.