'Selma' not just a movie.

AuthorDowd, Maureen
PositionEditorials

Byline: MAUREEN DOWD

I went Friday morning to see "Selma'' and found myself watching it in a theater full of black teenagers.

Thanks to donations, D.C. public school kids got free tickets to the first Hollywood movie about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday weekend -- an effort that was duplicated for students around the country.

The kids did plenty of talking and texting, and plenty of fighting over whether there was too much talking and texting. Slowly but surely, though, the crowd was drawn in by the Scheherazade skills of the "Selma'' director, Ava DuVernay.

The horrific scene of the four schoolgirls killed in the white supremacist bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, church stunned the audience. One young man next to me unleashed a string of expletives and admitted that he was scared. When civil rights leaders are clubbed, whipped and trampled by white lawmen as feral white onlookers cheer, the youngsters seemed aghast.

In a delicately wrought scene in which Coretta Scott King calls out her husband about his infidelities, some of the teenage girls reacted with a chorus of "oooohs.''

DuVernay sets the tone for her portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as patronizing and skittish on civil rights in the first scene between the president and King. LBJ stands above a seated MLK, pats him on the shoulder, and tells him "this voting thing is just going to have to wait'' while he works on "the eradication of poverty.''

Many of the teenagers by me bristled at the power dynamic between the men. It was clear that a generation of young moviegoers would now see LBJ's role in civil rights through DuVernay's lens.

And that's a shame. I loved the movie and find the Oscar snub of its dazzling actors repugnant. But the director's talent makes her distortion of LBJ more egregious. Artful falsehood is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.

DuVernay told Rolling Stone that, originally, the script was more centered on the LBJ-MLK relationship and was "much more slanted to Johnson.''

"I wasn't interested in making a white-savior movie,'' she said.

Hollywood has done that with films like "Mississippi Burning,'' which cast white FBI agents as the heroes, or "Cry Freedom,'' which made a white journalist the focus rather Denzel Washington's anti-apartheid activist, Steve Biko.

Instead of painting LBJ and MLK as allies, employing different tactics but complementing each other, the director made Johnson an obstacle.

Top Johnson...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT