The nationwide release of the film Selma, which concentrates on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1965 Selma marches for the cause of African-American voting rights in the segregated South, has been received with much fanfare and enthusiastic accolades. It is likely to be short-listed for “Best Picture” from the voters in this year’s Academy Awards.
Questions have been raised, however, about the film’s historical accuracy in its depiction of LBJ’s relationship to Dr. King, and his role in securing the Voting Rights Act, first by Joseph A. Califano Jr., chief advisor for domestic affairs to Johnson, and then by many others.
A major distortion that film critics did not notice was the absence of Ralph Abernathy, who, as King’s chief lieutenant, was always by his side during the marches. King said that he “was the best friend I have in the world”:
Dr. Abernathy and King travelled together, often sharing the same hotel rooms, jail cells, and leisure times with their wives, children, family, and friends. They fought together against segregation and discrimination, helped to establish new legislation, and tried to instill a new sense of pride, dignity, and self-worth in African Americans.
Abernathy suffered bombings, beatings by southern policemen and State Troopers, 44 arrests, and daily death threats against his life and those of his wife and children. His family’s land and automobile were confiscated and he had to re-purchase his automobile at a public auction. Some of his colleagues and some volunteers in the civil rights movement who worked with him were murdered.
Why, then, is Abernathy not shown at King’s side during the marches in Selma? Instead, he has been removed in much the same way they did it in Stalin’s Soviet Union, where photos of purged leaders who stood next to Stalin were erased and encyclopedia entries about them taken out of new editions.
While there are some sightings of Abernathy, his children stress that “the depiction of the role of [our] father is grossly mischaracterized.” Not only were King and Abernathy partners in the creation of the Selma protests, Abernathy, as journalist Jim Galloway writes, was even taken out of the opening scene at the White House, depicted as a one-and-one meeting of King with LBJ, which actually occurred with Abernathy present. In fact, King never went to the White House without Abernathy.
Selma’s director, Ava DuVernay, apparently gave in to the wishes of the King family that Abernathy’s role be diminished. Galloway suggests this took place because of their anger at what Abernathy wrote in his 1989 autobiography, in which he claimed that the night before he was assassinated in 1968, King had spent the night with two women. The film does let viewers know that King was not faithful to his wife, but the King family never forgave Abernathy for what he wrote. Abernathy’s own son has a different suggestion, which is that today people like a simplification of history and only have room for one hero to celebrate, who supposedly alone created the movement he led. King, therefore, was the “only symbol of the movement.”
That observation gets us to the essence of the argument made by the film’s critics. They have made the following charges, all of which have been proved correct from tape transcripts of Johnson’s phone conversations and other archival material:
DuVernay depicts LBJ as opposed to a civil rights bill and being forced to develop one because of King’s pressure. The truth is that Johnson had already ordered his staff to write one up, and phone conversations between King and LBJ prove they were on the same wavelength. The evidence can be found in Mark Updegrove’s article in Politico.
The film presents as fact that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover supposedly told LBJ that he would be glad to smear King if Johnson wanted that done. LBJ at first is hesitant, but then he asks a secretary to get back in touch with Hoover. The next scene shows Coretta Scott King opening a package that includes a recording of King in bed with another woman, and a threat that he stop organizing in Selma or that more such exposes would come and be made public.
The truth is that is that this took place during John F. Kennedy’s presidency, and that it was his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who approved Hoover’s actions. After that approval, Hoover sent the material implicating King to his wife. Andrew Young told Time: “We knew we were bugged, but that was before LBJ.”
Was it necessary to attribute this sleazy action to LBJ, just to make King look nobler? Was it done because to implicate Bobby Kennedy would besmirch a hero who is seen by history as a supporter of civil rights, and who has become a liberal icon? Did they put this in to emphasize that LBJ was a villain who was simply forced to support a Voting Rights Act by King’s marches?
The truth can easily be found in a book published in 2005, Nick Kotz’s Judgement Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America.
In his review of the book, New York Post journalist Eric Fettmann writes the following:
As a result of that president’s powers of persuasion, Congress passed the two most revolutionary laws in its history: the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and the 1965 Voting Rights Act… It should also go a long way toward reminding Americans of just how revolutionary a president Johnson was domestically, and especially on civil rights.
Almost from the moment he took office, Johnson made civil rights his top domestic priority, hoping it would lead to a massive war on poverty that would bring true equality to Americans…. in his first speech to Congress five days into his presidency, Johnson demanded passage of a civil rights bill: “We have talked long enough in this country about civil rights,” he said. “It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in a book of law.”
And the man he consciously reached out to for help was Martin Luther King.
Since the truth about LBJ’s relationship with King has been known since 2005, when Kotz published his book, why then did director DuVernay and Paul Webb, the writer of Selma, consciously distort the truth? Why do the TV reporters who interview DuVernay let her off the hook?
At other times, DuVernay and her defenders say that the film is not a documentary, but one that captures the essence of the heroism and bravery of the civil rights movement. That, they say, is what counts. The answer to why so many movie critics minimize the distortions and praise the film without any criticism is simple. They say that Selma is not in the past, but depicts for all to see how racism is just as bad today as it was in 1965, as evil Republicans now seek to take away the voting rights of African-Americans, thus nullifying the Voting Rights Act. No review was more egregious than that by Richard Corliss in the new issue of Time.
Corliss writes that the Voting Rights Act “has been effectively gutted by the Supreme Court.” And of course, he and other film critics all refer to Ferguson as proof that things have not changed since the segregated past. So if Selma does receive the Oscar, Corliss writes that the Academy members would be testifying to their “political consciences as well as to the film’s undeniable power.” Really? Are Academy members supposed to support a film because of a political message they agree with? Corliss concludes by saying the film “is a reminder that the ‘American problem’ has yet to be solved.”
Finally, the distortions, seen as unimportant to many, are in fact unforgivable. How many people believe that JFK was killed as a result of a conspiracy of the mafia, the CIA and homegrown racists, due to their learning their history from Oliver Stone’s warped and conspiracy mongering movie, JFK? I agree with columnist Richard Cohen, who writes:
Yet, the lesson a new generation will learn is, in important ways, a lie, and not one, as Picasso said, that “makes us realize truth.” It is, instead, a lie that tarnishes Johnson’s legacy to exalt King’s. But this story needed no embellishment — and in my movie, King himself would’ve protested the treatment of Johnson. The greatness of King never depended on the diminishment of others.
And as Cohen writes, if Selma wins the Oscar, “truth loses.”
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