How Martin Luther King Film Selma is Joining Protests Against Racial Inequality
Selma, the big-screen story of Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights marches, resonates so loudly in the US that the team behind the film are harnessing its release to the ongoing protests over policing and racial inequality, says Edward Helmore
EDWARD HELMORE
Published: 17 December 2014
Hollywood is rarely shy when it comes to a cause, but it has never made a film about Civil Rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. The oversight is about to be corrected by Selma, a $20 million feature film from a black female director and launched into a festive season already convulsing with racial tension.
The film follows the historic marches led by King from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery in 1965, a demonstration against black-voter intimidation that pushed President Johnson to introduce the Voting Rights Act that year. But unusually for Hollywood, the film’s director Ava DuVernay and cast — including British star David Oyelowo (The Butler, Spooks) — are harnessing the American release of the film to ongoing public protests over policing and racial inequality in the US.
Along with Oprah Winfrey (who has a role in the film made by Brad Pitt’s B Plan company that she also co-produced), they have become increasingly vociferous in the past week’s round of US publicity interviews, culminating in Sunday’s New York premiere and the “I can’t breathe” photograph they posed for. The T-shirts bearing the legend were first seen worn by professional basketball players in protest at the grand jury decision earlier this month not to prosecute NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for the killing of Eric Garner, who shouted the phrase repeatedly as he was held on the ground. On Saturday, the T-shirts were also seen worn by some of the 25,000 who joined the march in the city over fairer police treatment of suspects. There were more demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington DC, and a campaign song called I Can’t Breathe launched by Samuel L Jackson went viral. Outspoken stand-up Chris Rock has tweeted support for the campaign and the film, adding that he’s come to accept the racial character of the film industry (“It’s a white industry. Just as the NBA is a black industry. I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing. It just is”).
Oyelowo, who plays Dr King, has called the release of the film an act of “divine timing”. He said: “We couldn’t have predicted what would happen in terms of what’s going on, race relations-wise. We finished shooting in early July and by early August Michael Brown [the 18-year-old black man shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri] had been murdered and now we’re in the middle of the Eric Garner situation. I just think it shows ... we do not live in a post-racial America.”
One of his co-stars, Lorraine Toussaint, said she took her 10-year-old daughter on the New York march the day before the film’s premiere because she “wanted to make sure that she knows that she can make a difference; that it is important to stand up and speak out when there is wrong, when there is injustice. Evil only propagates when we are silent and so you know it’s a difficult time but our voices matter and I wanted my daughter to know that her voice matters.”
In a third racially explosive incident, in Cleveland, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot by police officers in circumstances that could be said to echo the death of a young black boy, Jimmie Lee Jackson, in Selma. DuVernay, 42, who in 2012 became the first black woman to win the Sundance Film Festival’s director award (for her prison-based relationship film, Middle of Nowhere, which also starred Oyelowo), is under no misapprehension about the similarities. She was still editing Selma when news broke of the Brown shooting. “You’re cutting a sequence where state troopers are lining up citizens and drawing guns on housewives, and you go home and watch Ferguson and see the same thing on television,” she told the Washington Post.
DuVernay made further movie history last week when she became the first black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe director’s award, one of four nods for the film, which include one for Oyelowo and have ignited Oscar speculation. But with the film’s award season direction established, the film’s creators are becoming enmeshed in the real-life political drama that is unfolding.
After viewing Selma, former President George HW Bush, who opposed the original 1964 Civil Rights Act, says it should remind Americans “how far we have come as a society”. John Lewis, the Democrat congressman who served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was beaten by police in the King marches and described Ferguson as “the modern-day Selma”.
That drew a swift response from President Obama, who said the problems between police and racial minorities can be solved if law enforcement agencies are open to retraining. “We’re not talking about systematic segregation or discrimination,” he corrected.
Polls, all the same, show that black and white Americans believe race relations are strained. Last week, CBS News found just 45 per cent think race relations are generally good, a 10 per cent drop since the spring and the lowest figure polled by the broadcaster since 1997.
Selma has certainly arrived as a timely reminder of the principles of the Civil Rights movement. In places an arduous watch, it has not received endorsements from King’s three surviving children. In DuVernay’s telling, the Civil Rights leader was a complex character. She calls him a “badass” and the film does not overlook his philandering. “I feel like there should be a dozen movies about Dr King,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “But why not start with the one that feels vitally representative of what he stood for?”
She says that she directs specifically with the gaze of a black woman, a perspective in keeping with Winfrey, who plays Annie Lee Cooper, one of the few women in an organisational role in the effort to overturn voting restrictions in a county where just 130 of 15,000 black residents were registered. US reviewers have noted the preponderance of British actors playing Southerners, among them Tom Wilkinson as Lyndon Johnson and Tim Roth as racist Alabama governor George Wallace.
DuVernay grew up in South Central Los Angeles and worked as a journalist before turning first to documentaries and then film publicity, and made her first feature just four years ago. Over eight years, the Selma project was linked to directors Michael Mann, Stephen Frears, Spike Lee and Lee Daniels, who made The Butler, which featured Oyelowo, now 38. The actor says he long dreamed of playing King. “I can genuinely say there was an overriding feeling of service ...”
For DuVernay, whose family on her father’s side live between Selma and Montgomery, the subject of King took her by surprise. “When this story, set in the past, came into my life, it really took over my imagination in a very unexpected way. And I’m happy it did. It honours the people of Selma, but it also represents the struggle of people everywhere to vote.”
How far her film can go in the award season is still too early to call but she clearly agrees with Oyelowo when he says: “This struggle continues and we all have to participate.”
Selma is released in the UK on February 6, 2015.
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| Selma march on March 7, 1965. |
EDWARD HELMORE
Published: 17 December 2014
Hollywood is rarely shy when it comes to a cause, but it has never made a film about Civil Rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. The oversight is about to be corrected by Selma, a $20 million feature film from a black female director and launched into a festive season already convulsing with racial tension.
The film follows the historic marches led by King from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery in 1965, a demonstration against black-voter intimidation that pushed President Johnson to introduce the Voting Rights Act that year. But unusually for Hollywood, the film’s director Ava DuVernay and cast — including British star David Oyelowo (The Butler, Spooks) — are harnessing the American release of the film to ongoing public protests over policing and racial inequality in the US.
Along with Oprah Winfrey (who has a role in the film made by Brad Pitt’s B Plan company that she also co-produced), they have become increasingly vociferous in the past week’s round of US publicity interviews, culminating in Sunday’s New York premiere and the “I can’t breathe” photograph they posed for. The T-shirts bearing the legend were first seen worn by professional basketball players in protest at the grand jury decision earlier this month not to prosecute NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for the killing of Eric Garner, who shouted the phrase repeatedly as he was held on the ground. On Saturday, the T-shirts were also seen worn by some of the 25,000 who joined the march in the city over fairer police treatment of suspects. There were more demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington DC, and a campaign song called I Can’t Breathe launched by Samuel L Jackson went viral. Outspoken stand-up Chris Rock has tweeted support for the campaign and the film, adding that he’s come to accept the racial character of the film industry (“It’s a white industry. Just as the NBA is a black industry. I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing. It just is”).
Oyelowo, who plays Dr King, has called the release of the film an act of “divine timing”. He said: “We couldn’t have predicted what would happen in terms of what’s going on, race relations-wise. We finished shooting in early July and by early August Michael Brown [the 18-year-old black man shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri] had been murdered and now we’re in the middle of the Eric Garner situation. I just think it shows ... we do not live in a post-racial America.”
One of his co-stars, Lorraine Toussaint, said she took her 10-year-old daughter on the New York march the day before the film’s premiere because she “wanted to make sure that she knows that she can make a difference; that it is important to stand up and speak out when there is wrong, when there is injustice. Evil only propagates when we are silent and so you know it’s a difficult time but our voices matter and I wanted my daughter to know that her voice matters.”
In a third racially explosive incident, in Cleveland, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot by police officers in circumstances that could be said to echo the death of a young black boy, Jimmie Lee Jackson, in Selma. DuVernay, 42, who in 2012 became the first black woman to win the Sundance Film Festival’s director award (for her prison-based relationship film, Middle of Nowhere, which also starred Oyelowo), is under no misapprehension about the similarities. She was still editing Selma when news broke of the Brown shooting. “You’re cutting a sequence where state troopers are lining up citizens and drawing guns on housewives, and you go home and watch Ferguson and see the same thing on television,” she told the Washington Post.
DuVernay made further movie history last week when she became the first black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe director’s award, one of four nods for the film, which include one for Oyelowo and have ignited Oscar speculation. But with the film’s award season direction established, the film’s creators are becoming enmeshed in the real-life political drama that is unfolding.
After viewing Selma, former President George HW Bush, who opposed the original 1964 Civil Rights Act, says it should remind Americans “how far we have come as a society”. John Lewis, the Democrat congressman who served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was beaten by police in the King marches and described Ferguson as “the modern-day Selma”.
That drew a swift response from President Obama, who said the problems between police and racial minorities can be solved if law enforcement agencies are open to retraining. “We’re not talking about systematic segregation or discrimination,” he corrected.
Polls, all the same, show that black and white Americans believe race relations are strained. Last week, CBS News found just 45 per cent think race relations are generally good, a 10 per cent drop since the spring and the lowest figure polled by the broadcaster since 1997.
Selma has certainly arrived as a timely reminder of the principles of the Civil Rights movement. In places an arduous watch, it has not received endorsements from King’s three surviving children. In DuVernay’s telling, the Civil Rights leader was a complex character. She calls him a “badass” and the film does not overlook his philandering. “I feel like there should be a dozen movies about Dr King,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “But why not start with the one that feels vitally representative of what he stood for?”
She says that she directs specifically with the gaze of a black woman, a perspective in keeping with Winfrey, who plays Annie Lee Cooper, one of the few women in an organisational role in the effort to overturn voting restrictions in a county where just 130 of 15,000 black residents were registered. US reviewers have noted the preponderance of British actors playing Southerners, among them Tom Wilkinson as Lyndon Johnson and Tim Roth as racist Alabama governor George Wallace.
DuVernay grew up in South Central Los Angeles and worked as a journalist before turning first to documentaries and then film publicity, and made her first feature just four years ago. Over eight years, the Selma project was linked to directors Michael Mann, Stephen Frears, Spike Lee and Lee Daniels, who made The Butler, which featured Oyelowo, now 38. The actor says he long dreamed of playing King. “I can genuinely say there was an overriding feeling of service ...”
For DuVernay, whose family on her father’s side live between Selma and Montgomery, the subject of King took her by surprise. “When this story, set in the past, came into my life, it really took over my imagination in a very unexpected way. And I’m happy it did. It honours the people of Selma, but it also represents the struggle of people everywhere to vote.”
How far her film can go in the award season is still too early to call but she clearly agrees with Oyelowo when he says: “This struggle continues and we all have to participate.”
Selma is released in the UK on February 6, 2015.
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