This week’s Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Film Club screening
was a historical drama based on the three marches that took place in America in
1965. These protest marches took place along the 54-mile highway from Selma,
located on the banks of the Alabama River, to Montgomery, the State Capital.
These marches formed part of the Selma Voting Rights Movement and were carried
out to demand the constitutional voting rights for African American’s. The
non-violent protest was lead by James Bevel, a leader of the 1960’s Civil
Rights movement, the civil right activist Hosea Williams and John Lewis, who
spent his life playing a key role in the struggle to end legalized racial
discrimination and segregation. But probable the best known of the four was Doctor
Martin Luther King Jnr a Baptist minister, activist, humanitarian and a leader
in the Civil Rights Movement who in 1964 won a Nobel Peace Prize.[1] The marches
would give a public face to people who were being denied any such
representation at the ballot box.
Selma (2014), is a film that has much to say about America and
racialism directed by Ava DuVernay who is the first African-American woman to
win a Best Director Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her second
feature film, Middle of Nowhere
(2012) that she wrote, directed and produced, that also stared David Oyelowo
who play’s Martin Luther King in her latest movie. She is also the first black
female to have a film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, although
she did not receive a nomination for best director.
These incidents portrayed in Selma took place 100 years after the Thirteenth Amendment which was
supposed to stop slavery and which was masterfully portrayed in Steven
Spielberg’s Lincoln
(2012). Have things really changed in America and for that matter the United
Kingdom parts of which seem to have transferred its prejudice from black people
to Muslims!
Almost 50 years ago, Rev Martin Luther King Jnr stood on the
steps of the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, and asked the question: “How
long?” We are still asking that question today: how long will it take before
America realises its promise of equal justice before the law? How long will it
take before racial prejudice, bigotry and hatred no longer exist?
Fifty years is a long time, a lifetime in fact.
And with all too much frequency, black men in the USA do not
even reach fifty because their life has been cut short by a governmental
department sworn to “serve and protect,” often by a bullet bought and paid for
by taxpayers, and an employee who is “just doing his job.”
For example in August 2014, Americans protested 500 miles north of
Selma in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white police officer killed Michael Brown
an unarmed black teenager. Although the white police office (Darren Wilson)
shot at the 18 year old twelve times - he was cleared of any wrongdoing. Almost
a week after this outrageous announcement from Ferguson, another grand jury
announces that a New York City police officer responsible for the homicide of
Eric Garner, who was 43 years old, will not be held to account.
Just two incidents, out of how many?
That Selma failed
to stir the massed Caucasian ranks of the Academy and BAFTA in the way that
Steve McQueen’s 12
Years a Slave did last year may be down to its sober treatment of
the origin of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; it is, nevertheless, a stinging irony
that a film about institutionalised racism should have met with such
indifference from the highest ranks of movie society, and has prompted renewed
calls for voter reform.
As well as Oyelowo, who gets a lead role worthy of his
talent, the film stars Tom Wilkinson as President Lyndon Johnson, Tim Roth as the
vile George Wallace Governor of Alabama and Carman Ejogo as Doctor King’s wife
Coretta Scott King[2], all, you will note, are British actors.
A moving indictment of racialism and bigotry that stunned
the RBCFT audience and stimulated the discussion that followed the movie, as well
as asking the question, we should not still be asking in 2015, how long must the
disgrace of racial hatred and bigotry continue in the so called civilised world?
[2] Carmen Elizabeth Ejogo (born 1973) is an British
actress and singer. She began her career as a teenager in London, hosting
the Saturday Disney morning show from 1993 to 1995.
Her film credits include What's the Worst That Could Happen?, Away We Go, Sparkle, Alex Cross,
and The Purge: Anarchy.
No comments:
Post a Comment