I had never seen his movie before yesterday. It seems in hindsight a shameful admission but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. For some reason that shame turned into an imperative for me on the occasion of the day that has been determined as a holiday in celebration and commemoration of the efforts and struggle of Dr. King as his fellow activists within the SCLC.
Perhaps it should be a regular yearly filmgramige were we regularly take the opportunity of this holiday to reground ourselves in the subject and the times. Whether it’s Selma, Ghosts of Mississippi, Mississippi Burning or even more fictional works such as A Time to Kill as opposed to the way civil rights leaders of today are typically treated as if they were nothing more than the manipulative blacksploitaionist preacher from Bonfire of the Vanities, we should watch these movies and documentaries. We should remember. We should learn. We should continue to act in service of justice.
They called him traitor. They called him degenerate. An agitator. A socialist. A communist. An anarchist. They accused him of staging events to create a spectacle, manipulating people into putting their lives on the line deliberately, then pointing fingers when the inevitable carnage occurred.
He wasn’t a perfect man. He had his fears, he had his regrets, he made his mistakes. Not everyone in the black community trusted him; many in fact resented him quite deeply. He struggled with enemies, detractors, skeptics and the spying eyes of the FBI just an arm’s reach away whether it was in pews as he preached from the pulpit, in the kitchens and living rooms as he drafted and then continually redrafted his plans with his compatriots, or within the curved walls of the White House and Oval Office.
Johnson ranted at him in bitter resentment of being forced to march to King’s agenda rather than the reverse, then let loose the dog of Hoover to hound and harass him to surrender his marriage and family if he persisted, if not his life if he did not relent.
He was no angel. No saint.
He was merely a man who refused to be dissuaded, refused to be diverted, refused to be delayed. When he saw injustice he simply pointed a steady, courageous, unwavering finger of righteousness at it, despite the personal risks, the death threats, and the suffering of his wife and family.
As I watched the film I found none of this surprising. Tom Wilkinson as the surly and fouled mouthed Lyndon B. Johnson was as advertised and expected. Tim Roth’s steely performance as George Wallace was notable in its cold casual evil, like a Bond villain devoid of even the slightest hint of empathy who would consider the death of a “nigra” no more emotionally stirring than the swatting of a momentarily annoying fly.
The coldly bigoted dispatches from the FBI surveillance team to their snakelike head J. Edgar Hoover played by veteran actor Dylan Baker were a constant reminder during scene changes of just how deeply and casually the racism flowed even among the college educated and largely Yankee FBI rank-and-file.
As I had suspected and feared, almost none of the non-black characters were even slightly sympathetic. The lone exception was a Boston priest who volunteers in answer to Dr. King’s call for people of faith from all races to stand by their side only to be quickly beaten to death in the streets by racist hooligans when he attempts to go out for a bite to eat at night in Selma with friends.
“Now you know what it feels like to be a nigger” his attackers taunt.
Sadly the fact is that I’m certain his film likely failed to attract as broad based an audience as it deserves because it is quite difficult for anyone to watch such relentless vileness, from this murder, to the state troopers who beat and shot Jimmie Lee Jackson to death after using a billy club to choke his mother and pulverize his 82-year-old grandfather for their participation in a night time march while Dr. King is away, to the church bombing that murdered four innocent young girls at Bible study, and to listen to the cheers of white bystanders waving the confederate stars and bars while the deputies of the vicious Sheriff Jim Clark take their clubs and tear gas to the voting rights marchers on their first attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
There is much in this film that we fail to remember at our peril, and many obvious parallels with our current human rights struggles and times.
That very point was made by Dr. King’s daughter this past December on the 60th anniversary of his Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Bernice King told a standing room-only crowd at Ebenezer Baptist, where her father had preached, that blacks faced the erosion of voting rights, environmental injustice and rising gun deaths.
“What would my father say?” asked King, who was frequently interrupted by deafening applause. “He’d say, ‘What is taking you all so long?'”
She added, “Now is the time to be resilient, now is the time to be determined.”
This is markedly different from constant attempts by conservatives to use the nonviolence of King’s movement to criticize and invalidate the current movements for social and racial justice today. Case in point: When Fox & Friends asked Dr. King’s conservative-leaning niece if he would feel bad about the “War On Police.”
“Today is, of course a big holiday all across the country,” Fox News host Steve Doocy told MLK’s niece, Aveda King. “You look at Black Lives Matter, you look at the war on police and even the political tone in the nation. What would your uncle think about what’s going on in his America today?”
Aveda King, who is often featured on Fox News for her conservative views, suggested that some people were “stirring up that fear and that anger.”
“Put some solutions on the table, teaching people to use their words, rather than bombs or guns or fists,” she said. “And use their words to heal rather than destroy.”
Conservatives often argue that Dr. King’s movement “solved” all our race problems. But now seven years into administration of our first African-American president those who may have felt that way have been clearly proven wrong.
Back in 2008, it seemed as though a coalition of people of color, progressive whites and young people had finally triumphed. Even if there was an initial backlash on the part of some skeptical whites, we looked with hope toward scholarship that showed, in time, black executives eventually won over enough of their constituents to effectively govern.
By well into Obama’s second term – in other words, now – went the thinking back then, the country should find itself beyond race. Obama’s presence in the Oval Office, and his demonstrated competence as the nation’s chief executive, would make whites more comfortable with blacks. As a result, racism would begin to fade away, eventually disappearing.
It hasn’t happened.
Instead, the racial climate during Obama’s watch has become even more divisive. Seven years into his presidency, we’ve witnessed one race-related tragedy after another. The murder of Trayvon Martin was followed by the Charleston massacre, and the deaths of black folks at the hands of white police officers in Illinois, Ohio, New York, South Carolina and Texas.
It just so happens that on this very same day, DeRay McKesson, one of the people who has been putting forth his words and his commitment against injustice as a proponent of Black Lives Matter and an author of the Campaign Zero project which has produced a ten-point plan for racial justice was featured on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show.
“People misremember King today,” McKesson said. “They remember, like, the safe King — they don’t remember, like, the radical revolutionary King. He talked about redistribution of wealth and economic justice — he was more aggressive than the dream that people remember.”
McKesson, a prolific Twitter user, said technology offers a crucial advantage to present-day civil rights activists that wasn’t available to King or his contemporaries.
“The issues are the same,” he said. “We didn’t invent resistance, we didn’t discover injustice, but technology has allowed us to amplify these issues in ways that we couldn’t before and has accelerated the pace of organizing in ways that are really powerful.”
So yes, we should remember King. Correctly. We should learn from King. The issues of his time were not simple, he was not a simple or a perfect man. The situation was messy then, it is messy now. We should take heed and take note.
It’s not just the blood, the violence, the doubt and the struggles of which we should note, it’s also the eventual triumph as words King used to criticize Johnson are eventually echoed by him in his sour critique of Wallace. Eventually his words broke through, eventually the message was received, and eventually it will be received in our current time. With activists like the leaders of BLM, and like McKesson and Shaun King, police officers who are willing to come forward and confirm the reality of black America as has Sgt. Michael A Wood Jr., with writers—hopefully—like myself, and marchers and demonstrators and people of good faith, strong courage. Imperfect people, like Dr. King.
Eventually, we shall overcome.