The 50-Mile March That Changed American History

Rating: 10/10 (30 January 2015)

The civil rights movement that galvanized people of all ages, races, colors, creeds, and religions in the America of the 1960s was one of the most important parts of our history; and at the head of all this was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Even after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, and the March on Washington in 1963, black churches in the segregated South were still being bombed; black people were still being lynched; and voting rights were still being denied to those who were neither White nor possessed of enough money. Meanwhile in Washington, even with the Civil Rights Act having been passed, President Lyndon Johnson was still vacillating over the issue of voting rights. To get the point across to Johnson that this was a moral issue, Dr. King and his people organized what became the Selma-to-Montgomery march in March 1965. That event and the things that led up to it are at the heart of director Ava DuVernay's powerful 2014 historical film SELMA.
SELMA begins with one of the aforementioned church bombings that characterized the White Southern backlash against the civil rights movement following the killings of three Voting Rights workers in August 1964, and follows the efforts of Dr. King (portrayed here by David Oleyowo) as he attempts to organize a big event that would galvanize the nation. Even as he does this, with help from his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), he is constantly being dogged by hostile forces—in a covert way from the machinations of FBI chieftain J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker), and in a more overt and violent way from Alabama governor George Wallace (Tim Roth) and Dallas County sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston), plus the brutality from the white segregationists and Ku Klux Klansmen. And there is the issue of Oleyowo's infidelity towards Ejogo at this crucial time in his life and in the life of the movement that he is leading. But once he goes through all these elements, he remains resolute, even through the attempts by Johnson (Wilkinson) to have Oleyowo stop the movement (and supposedly stop the violence), Selma soon becomes the new epicenter of King's quest for equality. It comes at a bloody cost, first with the Bloody Sunday incident on March 7th, and then the KKK-administered beating of one of King's white supporters just a night or two later. None of this deters Oleyowo's quest, however; and on March 21st, he and 8,000 of his fellow citizens, black, white, Jewish, gentile, Protestants, and Catholics alike, make the 50-mile march from Selma, across the infamous Edmund Pettis Bridge, and through two very dangerous Alabama counties to the state capital in Montgomery to press the case.
While it can be said that we have made incredibly great strides to get away from the overt bigotry of the past, even with an African-American in the White House at the time of its release, SELMA depicts a time in our history that, though long past, is still relevant today. Racism and bigotry are always going to be parts of certain Americans' DNA, especially since the nation, in the 21st century, is becoming much more ethnically diversified and less White. But it was not always so in Dr. King's time, when blacks often made up the majority of rural counties in the South, but only constituted maybe two percent of the eligible voting population, hemmed in as they were by regulations drawn up by segregationists. Both director DuVernay and screenwriter Webb depict this in very stark fashion, with Oleyowo giving a very stoic performance as the great Dr. King, and Ejiogo equally fine as his wife Coretta. Wilkinson and Roth do very good turns as, respectively, the old guard LBJ and the uber-segregationist Wallace. SELMA also features good turns from Cuba Gooding Jr. as one of the young lawyers arguing the case for the march, and Martin Sheen as the Alabama judge who, though perhaps more covert in his racial views, grants the order allowing the march to go forth.
Having seen this film in a theater on Martin Luther King Day in 2015, it made me appreciate even more than I had before how big a part of the mid-to-late 20th century the civil rights movement was in America, at a time when we were going through the most turbulent period in our history since the end of the Civil War; and the lessons from that period are still being absorbed, even though more Americans of non-White ethnicity have entered the political arena in our time. In that sense, SELMA, along with the classic 1970 documentary KING: A FILMED RECORDMONTGOMERY TO MEMPHIS, will likely become required viewing in years to come in high school, community college, and university classes. While we have made great strides, America as a "more perfect union" is still a work in progress, and SELMA, one of the best films of 2014, illustrates why this is still true even in the 21st century.