"If We're Not on the Voter Rolls, We Can"t be on the Juries, and so the Klansmen Go Free"

Rating: 7/10 (19 February 2018)

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing all Americans the right to vote was ratified in 1870, and yet almost a century later (1965) when the events of "Selma" transpired, no more than 2% of African-American citizens were registered to vote in many deep-South counties. And as we see in the beginning of Selma, you practically had to memorize the U.S. Constitution to satisfy the county registrars, but that still might not be good enough. So, as depicted in this dramatically stirring film, Martin Luther King has to mobilize his marchers in Alabama and incur horrendous beatings from the Alabama troopers, and thereby dramatize the injustice of the voting impediments that are brought to bear on black Alabamans. This elicits the nation's political attention and white sympathy. All of this culminates in the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The British actor, David Oyelowo, seems to be the reincarnation of ML King. He looks remarkably like him, and even sounds like him, even when he's portraying King's masterful oratory. In Selma, King's tactical shrewdness is depicted to great effect. He protected the safety of his followers, to the extent he could, but he realized that the Bull Connor's (Birmingham) and Sheriff Clark's (Selma) were, in a macabre sort of way, the best arguments for the 1960s civil rights movement. I wonder how long segregation would have persisted in the south with national television.
There's a debate in all historically-themed films on how much scope to give to artistic / dramatic license and how much faithfulness a film should give to the historical record. I'm not a strict pedant on historical accuracy, and thus I acknowledge that films can appropriately push their dramatic momentum by slight or modest revisions in the historical record. But Selma goes too far in its unfairness to President Johnson. Sure, it makes for more dramatic tension to have an quasi-adversarial relationship between LBJ and King, but they were far more partners than adversaries. LBJ wanted a voting rights act as soon as the Democrats piled up huge Congressional majorities in the 1964 Goldwater election. Not a lot of things went right for LBJ in his 2nd term; let's at least give him some credit for working with King to get the voting rights law enacted.
A final delicious moment that Selma reminds me of: in the special Alabama senatorial election in December of 2017, Doug Jones defeated the noxious Roy Moore largely with the votes of black Alabamans, especially black women, who had the voting power they sorely lacked in 1965.