History in the making

When directors J.J. Abrams and Alfonso Cuaron read out this year’s Oscar nominations last month there was an immediate outcry that will continue up to and beyond the ceremony on February 22. Selma got snubbed and lots of people were as mad as hell.

Selma actually got two nominations, including best picture, so normally that would not be considered a snub. But there was no best director nomination for Ava DuVernay, no best actor nomination for David Oyelowo and nothing for supporting players who do such a sterling job of fleshing out the story of how Martin Luther King used the tiny Alabama town of Selma as a flashpoint for the civil rights movement.

Immediately there were accusations of racism and conservatism among the mostly white, elderly male membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the august body which each year anoints what they believe to be the highest achievements in cinema in the past 12 months.

Even though the Academy had the previous year given 12 Years a Slave a best picture Oscar, it did not stop a backlash, with many decrying the lack of black actors among the nominees (“The whitest Oscars in years!”) as well as shaking their heads at the missed opportunity to nominate for the first time an African-American female director.

A more likely explanation for the Academy not fully embracing Selma, which most critics agree is a major achievement and the equal of all of this year’s Oscar frontrunners, is the controversy that has exploded over the film’s depiction of the relationship between Martin Luther King and then president Lyndon B. Johnson.
On July 2, 1964, the president signed into law the Civil Rights Act, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that barred discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin.

While the Civil Rights Act ended segregation, the white population in many parts of the US (especially the South) held down their African-American population through other means, such as manipulating voter registration.

Even though African-Americans were the majority in many Southern voting districts, there were disproportionately large numbers of whites on the rolls because police and voting officials employed arcane laws and intimidation tactics to discourage African-American citizens from even attempting to register.

So King and other members of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose one such Southern town, Selma, to become the battleground in which he would bring national attention to the problem of voter registration.

Selma was selected because King wanted a place in which violence would be the most likely result of his non-violent approach, that is, he was looking for a racist baton- wielding sheriff who would order his troops to attack protesters.

This is exactly what happened on March 7, 1965. When the protesters set out on a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery all hell broke loose, with marchers mowed down by horses, beaten by nightsticks and tear-gassed.

The horrific images beamed across the US and around the world galvanised public opinion and infuriated Johnson, who immediately set about pushing through a bill to ensure the rights of African-Americans to vote.

All of this is very straightforward and dramatised beautifully by DuVernay, a veteran film publicist making only her second movie, and performed wonderfully by her cast, with Oyelowo imbuing King with just the right mix of gravitas, moral force and canniness (he is not a saintly figure but, like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, a pragmatist and supreme political thinker).

What DuVernay conjures up are the conversations between King and Johnson who, in her version of the Selma story emerges not as a hero of the civil rights movement but as a villainous figure who tells the African-American that he has bigger fish to fry (he is trying to put through a bill to end poverty) and that voting equality must wait.

Even more controversially, DuVernay has Johnson letting the notorious FBI boss, J. Edgar Hoover, off the leash, allowing him to use any means necessary to undermine King — tactics that include having one of his agents contact King’s wife Coretta to give details of his adulterous behaviour.

Historians and those close to the president were outraged when they got wind of DuVernay’s version of history, led by former Johnson aide Joseph Califano, who argued that Selma so distorted the facts it should be ruled out of award-season contention.

Even progressive, movie-loving New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd criticised the film for its “artful falsehoods” and worries that young people seeing Selma will assume that Johnson was an obstacle to civil rights and not its greatest white champion.

Others have counterattacked saying that the scenes in the movie showing Johnson attempting to hold back King’s drive for a Voting Rights Act are brief and largely captured the spirit of respectful conflict between the two men (some even point out that Johnson did have an unhealthily close relationship with Hoover).

Not surprisingly, most forgiving of DuVernay’s rewriting of history for dramatic effect (they needed a villain and Johnson of Shakespearean dimension) and political relevance (she was sick of seeing white saviours) are film scholars, who are weary of the old fact versus fiction debate that flares up every year at Oscar time.

“It makes you crazy when you confront, year after year, that no one understands either the movies or history. We’re trying to hold movies to a truth we can’t hold history to. History is always someone’s opinion,” leading film historian Jeanine Basinger said.

Selma opens today.