I finally went to see the “Selma” movie, but I didn’t know what to expect. My friends had indicated that it moved slowly, and in my mind, that meant plodding. So I settled back in the darkened theater yesterday with a handful of people to catch a glimpse of one violent episode in American history.
The movie began very serenely, with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preparing himself to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Then I watched as five little black girls chatted innocently about hair styles as they descended stairs, and for a fleeting moment I wondered if they were depicting the girls from the Birmingham church bombing. Then BOOM came a blast so loud and so violent that even as I anticipated it, it startled me and made me jump. The resulting image of bodies of the little girls lying among the rubbish was heartbreaking.
Wow! That set the tone, and I knew this movie would be far from tedious.
The bombing was, for me, a metaphor for the movie and the times. It was as if director Ava DuVernay had taken one of the most brutal and pivotal events of the civil rights era and turned it into the theme of the movie: the calm of the Southern landscape shattered by the impending clash of white right and black might.
Life would never be so fixed again.
In another scene, I watched as a black woman (played by Oprah Winfrey) neatly wrote her name on a registration form, not sure after countless times if she might finally pass the literacy test that under Jim Crow laws had stripped her of her right to vote.
Cooper, Annie Lee, she wrote.
Wow, again. My grandmother’s name was Annie Lee, and I instantly felt a connection to the experience of “Selma” and the story it was about to tell. My Annie Lee was a gentle woman, not prone to making a fuss, and I cannot imagine that she’d defy white southern rules to try to vote. She was too old by then, tending us grandchildren while our mothers worked rather than going after the civil rights due her.
This movie was not slow-moving for me; it was powerful, intense and engaging. I was in the thick of the planning for the march, and the beatings and taunts by animalistic white southerners who were desperately trying to hang on to beliefs that were as much a part of them as their arms and legs. I felt the gnawing fear of black people marching with no protection, not sure if they’d live through it but brave and defiant anyway.
I knew the violent end of the first Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, the merciless attack on black people walking peacefully to the state Capitol. What I did not know were the details of how they got there and the aftermath of that encounter. I’m always interested in the story behind the ending; that’s what my blog is about. In this case, DuVernay filled in the details, and permeated the story with music that pierced the soul and loosened the tears.
She made history come alive, its protagonists and its antagonists real people with right and wrong agendas, both on opposite sides of history but clearly only one destined to survive it. The survivors were like a burning fire – not so easily extinguished, erupting here and there, until it overtook its prey. That’s the legacy of Selma – and the civil rights movement itself – and its place in history.
(Interestingly, the march wound its way through Lowndes County, a Ku Klux Klan stronghold, where the Lowndes County Freedom Organization was trying to register blacks to vote, among other things. The group’s logo was a black panther, and it was known as the Black Panther Party long before the more well-known one was formed in California. A banner with the name of the Alabama group and its logo sold at auction two years ago for $36,000 – a telling note of the group’s own place in the movement.)
The movie was not slow-moving like molasses (well, maybe the ending was prolonged), but was the bittersweet tale of people like the Annie Lees who simply wanted to live in peace.
