Selma: a Hollywood fabrication

By Ben Adenbaum

The film Selma, is a fine movie if you want to see a story about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was very disturbed, however, by the blatant misrepresentation of the story. The film attempted to portray the Civil Rights movement as a movement by African Americans, for African Americans, and with no others involved. The film discounts the involvement of Jews, white Northerners, and even conscientious Southerners who supported the movement. What the film truly failed to accurately represent, however, was the role of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. In a biopic, peoples’ opinions of history can be formed by the representation of story. To get the history so wrong is completely unacceptable.

A major point in Selma was how Dr. King was most central to the marches and how he had to drag the president from Texas into the Civil Rights Movement, kicking and screaming. The film disregards the fact that Johnson considered the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as his greatest achievement. The film does not show that Johnson was an active partner of King in the choosing of the site for the marches. Selma was chosen as the site of the marchers, because, even with its 60 percent African American population, only 335 out of every 10,000 African Americans were registered to vote. Joseph Califano Jr., who was Johnson’s top assistant for domestic affairs from 1965-69, stated in his Op-Ed in the Washington Post that “the film falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and as opposed to the Selma march itself.” The film shows Johnson using the FBI to discredit King, disregarding that the FBI’s operations against King were authorized and put into place under Attorney General Robert Kennedy. It does not explain how, when Johnson became President, the great general of Southern interest in the Senate, Richard Russell, stated to his colleagues that “We could have beaten Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon.”

The film does not recognize that Johnson had acted against the interest of the South—whose citizens had been his constituents for twenty-three years before his elevation to national office—by passing the strongest Civil Rights legislation since reconstruction. The film only represents the history that advances its point. The writers of Selma dug up the names of the Sheriffs of Albany, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama fifty years after the marches in Selma but were either unwilling or unable to use any of the information stored in the Presidential Library of Lyndon Johnson to accurately portray him as the proponent of Civil Rights that he was.

The writers made a massive show of how, during the third march, there was no opposition while neglecting to mention that Johnson had called the Governor of Alabama to Washington. The film then neglected to show that, after having Governor George Wallace admit that he could not protect the marchers, Johnson federalized the National Guard to protect the marchers.

The film not only misrepresents the broad efforts of Lyndon Johnson, but it also fails to capture the nuances of his personality. Lyndon Johnson was a brutal taskmaster with his underlings. He would even go so far as to have the door open while he was on the toilet and force his aides to watch as he bellowed orders to them. Yet the film repeatedly shows Johnson as looking to his aides for advice. During the scene after Dr. King has left the White House, an aide comes to ask Johnson what he needs. Johnson would have been roaring orders to get Hoover on the line, not waiting for someone to suggest it.

Yet what is most offensive about this film is how it justifies its blatant misrepresentation of facts. The writers and directors are able to say that they took creative liberties for dramatization. That attitude is fine in films where the historical event happened far enough in the past so that no one associated with the contents of the movie is still alive. This film, however, portrays events that took place only fifty years in the past. Documentation of the Selma marches is readily available to the public, and Johnson’s involvement is very well documented. Johnson echoed the cries of the Civil Rights movement by including “And we shall overcome” in his address to a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965.

Selma gives the impression that Johnson did this for a solely political reason, not because he was expressing his desire for the success of the movement. This statement was not an action solely for political gain, as indicated in the film, but it was said because Johnson had grown up poor. He had lived in similar circumstances to those whom he championed. Johnson’s first reaction when he heard of Felix Longoria, a veteran of Mexican descent who could not be buried in his home town’s cemetery because “The white people wouldn’t like it,” was to say “By God, we’ll bury him in Arlington!” This is not to say Lyndon Johnson was without his flaws. As a younger Congressman and then Senator from Texas, Johnson had voted in step with the Southern bloc against Civil Rights legislation. But as president, starting in 1963, Johnson emerged as a champion of the rights of all. By disregarding the historical accuracy of the times, the film is a disappointment to those who understand how badly it misrepresented the facts. Selma has doomed itself in my eyes.

#opinion