Selma, a movie depicting some of the events leading to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is not considered a history of the civil rights movement. Nor is it a biopic of the life and times of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The movie strives for none of that. And yet, a movie that so narrowly focuses on the events of the various marches on Selma, Ala. was about much more than that.
The recent tensions related to the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown last August in Ferguson, Mo. plus other race-related tragedies placed race relations squarely in the forefront of American discourse. Certainly, the events depicted in Selma portrayed a shameful period of American history.
Robert Jones, Jr., writer from Brooklyn, N.Y. wrote a treatise aimed at Selma director Ana DuVernay. His open letter to DuVernay begins with imagery of black children and adults facing modern day atrocities that brought to mind the outrages that our forefathers in the fight for equality faced in simply winning the right to vote.
That battle for the right to vote was central to Selma, and brings the voter turnout of the past election into negative relief, as so many people died for the right to do something the law said they should be able to all along.
As depicted in the movie, Alabama Gov. George Wallace pointed out in a conversation with President Lyndon B. Johnson that blacks had the legal right to vote. However, poll taxes they could not afford and other demands made it all but impossible for any more than a minute number of blacks to vote.
Considering all that, is there really an excuse for voter turnout in the 2014 election to be at its lowest point since World War II?
I digress. The point behind Selma may not have been to be a history of the civil rights movement as a whole. It may not have been to depict Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life. It may not even have been specifically to demonstrate how much has changed in 50 years ... and how little has changed in that span.
So what was the point of Selma? All of the above, and much more. Performances by David Oyelowo, who portrayed King, Tom Wilkinson as Johnson and Nigel Thatch, who portrayed Malcolm X and bore an uncanny resemblance to the civil rights activist, and others in the cast showed many of the difficulties behind the scenes in planning marches, in interpersonal relationships and in the big picture fight for equality, including the differences between the various branches of the movement that threatened to tear it apart.
Selma may not have been the perfect movie -- there are disputes about the accuracy of the movie's depiction of the King-Johnson relationship and an actor in the movie said he wished it depicted "just how demented" Wallace was -- but as a power reminder of how far we've come in the fight for equal rights, and how far we haven't come, Selma certainly was worth sitting over two hours to watch.
