MLK - Selma movie review

The fuss and ado about ‘The Interview’ has taken attention away from another new movie that is being released. "Selma", is about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, which opened in a number of cities this week and expands to nationwide release in a couple of weeks.

Selma has won nearly unanimous praise from film critics for its unflinching look at King as a true radical who upset not just a fringe of racists in the South, but the entire political establishment. Salamishah Tillet praises the film for reclaiming “Hollywood's sanitized versions” of Dr. King as simply part of a “simple story of American racial progress.” Those who stood alongside him in the demonstrations in the South, are shown not as conciliators looking to simply make racial harmony through dialogue, but as both agitators and lawbreakers – in the most righteous ways.

President John F Kennedy  held a meeting on the civil rights movement, and he aired his complaints about King openly, worrying that he looked like a Marxist radical:

“I think we ought to have some of these other meetings before we have it in the King group;  otherwise, the meetings will look like they got me to do it. ... The trouble with King is, everybody thinks he’s our boy anyway. So everything he does, everybody says we stuck him in there. So we ought to have him well surrounded. ... I think we ought to have a good many others. King is so hot these days that it looks like Marx coming to the White House, I should have—I’d like to have at least some Southern governors or mayors or  businessmen in first”

Robert Kennedy was the acting Attorney General, and on JFK's orders he in 1963 authorized wiretaps of King's personal residence. JFK's wife Jackie is recorded as saying, “I just can't see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man's terrible.”

We frequently hear the March on Washington ‘I have a dream’ speech but we rarely hear his furious anti-war indictment of 1967 or his anti-povertyspeeches.

For years, King cultivated a close relationship with President Lyndon Johnson, knowing he was essential to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act. Indeed, the two spent many hours meeting not only in person but frequently talked on the phone. King would raise the issue of the Vietnam War, only to be rebuffed in his warnings. Eventually, MLK grew so impatient with Johnson that he gave a marquee speech at Riverside Church in New York City criticizing the war. King called the U.S. Government the “greatest purveyor of violence on earth,” and quoted a U.S. Official who said America was on the “wrong side of a world revolution.” He called for comprehensive peace talks aimed at removing American forces from Vietnam and ending the bombing campaigns. The real target of progressive campaigners, he declared, needed to be three evils: racism, materialism, and militarism, resulting in the Washington liberal elite turning against Martin Luther King. 168 major newspapers denounced King's stance, and Johnson disinvited him from the White House permanently.

In November 1967, King devised what he called the “Poor People's Campaign,” designed to be “the beginning of a new co-operation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity.” This was the campaign that brought him to Tennessee where he was tragically assassinated.

 "Selma" focuses on King's campaign in Alabama and does not tell the tales of resisting the Vietnam War or the Poor People's Campaign. We can only hope the film renews discussion and debate about the necessary place of radicalism in our politics, radicalism that was courageously represented by Martin Luther King.