Selma - A Review

Selma, released 50 years after the Civil Rights demonstration in the small city that gave it its name, is a timely portrait of a man who changed the way white America viewed the black population and set the groundwork for the post-Civil Rights struggle that African Americans are engaged in to this day. Whilst for many the watershed moment of the Civil Rights movement was two years earlier in Washington D.C where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech, Selma instead focuses on the campaign following his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. By doing this, it tackles MLK as a man already at the height of his power and notoriety. We see him as a powerhouse capable of exerting influence both on the streets and in the oval office. By establishing him in this context, the film frames its narrative around the movement itself rather than turning into a biopic, and this is where it finds its strength.

MLK was a great man, but also a flawed one. The film directly addresses his extramarital affairs and the way that they were used by the FBI to threaten and extort him in an attempt to get him to call off the march at Selma, but more than that it touches on the struggles he personally had in advocating his nonviolent approach to protest. In one particularly powerful scene we see MLK and his fellow protestors standing back as an elderly woman is beaten and pinned down by police outside of the courthouse in Selma. Nonviolence was essential in assuring that the protestors could not be portrayed as anarchists in the media, and it was certainly an extremely effective tool in gaining support for the movement, particularly from sympathetic whites, but it required extreme self control to maintain, and to many the lack of an attempt to aid the victimised was seen as callous. MLK never doubted the power of nonviolence and saw that it was perhaps the only way to advance the Civil Rights Movement, but in Selma we see the inherent risks in exposing civilians to aggression and refusing to respond.

MLK was willing to die for his cause, and in the end he did, but despite this (and because of the FBI’s revelation of his affairs to his wife) he was not present at the Selma to Montgomery march on March 7, 1965 when journalists’ captured the violent assault of over 600 protestors by state troopers and county sheriff’s deputies. This was the breaking point for the Selma movement, and MLK’s absence is notable in large part due to the fact that it paved the way for young SNCC member John Lewis to rise to the forefront of the Civil Rights movement. Leading the marchers alongside fellow activist Hosea Williams, Lewis was beaten to the ground and fractured his skull. Despite this, he escaped and continued to aid other activists before being taken to hospital. Lewis was the youngest of the ‘big six’ Civil Rights leaders, and came to represent the grassroots activism on the frontlines when MLK, Malcolm X and the others were seen as being mere talking heads. He would go on to have a successful career in congress, but this was where he established himself as a more-than-competent successor to the older movement leaders as they were assassinated and otherwise made less relevant. Selma does well in portraying this side of the story and highlighting the tension within the Civil Rights movement itself at this time. MLK was a figurehead but without grassroots activism and the likes of Lewis and SNCC organising individuals long before he arrived, the events in Selma never could have come to fruition.

The film ends with MLK’s victorious speech at Montgomery after the successful third march from Selma. We know that three years later, and several less successful movements attempting to tackle poverty, the Vietnam War and segregated housing in Chicago, he was assassinated. The question that remains as the credits roll is to what extent did MLK make change, and how far can his legacy go to continue to change black and minority lives in the US? 50 years later we watch the events at Selma unfold in fictionalized form in the aftermath of one of the largest racially defined protest movements in recent times; the Black Lives Matter response to the killing of unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson by police, and the similar death of Eric Garner after being choked by officers in the NYPD. In many ways these deaths echo the violence suffered by black individuals during the Civil Rights movement at the hands of the police, but these incidents are fewer and further between, and public response clearly no longer needs to be won through extended protest by the black community – responses to the Ferguson events were quickly formulated and extensive.

We have certainly come a long way from the days of the Civil Rights movement, and Selma does a good job of exposing the overt racism of the time that infected every element of public life and made life so much harder for African Americans, particularly in the south. However, in the aftermath of Ferguson and at a time when more black men are under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850, we have to ask if we really are living in MLK’s colour blind society, or if such racism has just become covert. Selma focuses on King’s push for voting rights but, thanks to mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement laws, there are more disenfranchised African Americans today than in 1870. Despite falling crime rates, the US prison population has quintupled in the last 30 years, and blacks are incredibly overrepresented behind bars, due to the fact that black men are 35 times more likely to be arrested than white men. Police racism may not be as widespread or as overt as it was fifty years ago, but it still exists. It does not exist in every officer, but it still exists. It may not affect all of us, but it still exists.

Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, suggests that mass incarceration represents a new form of segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans and other minority populations. She argues that in order to carry the torch that Martin Luther King held before his assassination and ensure that his legacy is not wasted we should return to the streets and challenge this new form of oppression through nonviolent protest. His work is not yet done, and Selma hopefully comes at a time where black issues are salient enough in the public mind to remind us that things can be done to make a change if it is so needed. As a call to take notice of these issues, Selma has done its job. The rest is up to us.