Is Selma historically accurate?

Selma (2014)
Director: Ava DuVernay
Entertainment grade: B+
History grade: A

In 1965, Dr Martin Luther King Jr led a campaign in Selma, Alabama, to secure voting rights for black citizens.

Controversy

In December 1964, Martin Luther King Jr (David Oyelowo, perfect) meets President Lyndon B Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to discuss the issue of black people being denied their legal right to vote. Johnson wants King to wait. “Let’s not start another battle when we haven’t even won the first,” he says, referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he signed into law with King standing right behind him. “And you know what the next battle should be? The elimination of poverty. I’m calling it the war on poverty. This voting thing is going to have to wait.” Selma has run into controversy over its portrayal of Johnson. Critics have seized on a comment by one of King’s aides, Andrew Young, who has said that the real meeting was not confrontational.

However, the scene in the film is very close to the account in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr, a volume of King’s own writings collected by Clayborne Carson in 1998. King remembered that he had told Johnson that the voting rights issue was serious and immediate. “Martin, you’re right about that. I’m going to do it eventually, but I can’t get a voting rights bill through this session of Congress,” Johnson replied. “Now, there’s some other bills that I have here that I want to get through in my Great Society program, and I think in the long run they’ll help Negroes more, as much as a voting rights bill.”

King pushed him, and Johnson continued: “I can’t get it through, because I need the votes of a southern bloc to get these other things through… it’s just not the wise and the politically expedient thing to do.”

These words may have been said confrontationally or calmly, but they’re a lot like what Johnson says in the movie. King’s account makes it clear that he was not satisfied by Johnson’s response and that he started the Selma campaign despite Johnson’s cold feet. The film portrays this accurately.

More controversy

Former Johnson assistant Joseph A Califano Jr has alleged that Johnson and King “were partners in this effort. Johnson was enthusiastic about voting rights and the president urged King to find a place like Selma and lead a major demonstration”. Califano’s memory of these events is at odds with much of the historical record, including other first-hand accounts.

Eric F Goldman, special consultant to Johnson and to his White House office, wrote in his 1969 book The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: “He [Johnson] was no great admirer of Martin Luther King, among other reasons because he questioned how well his judgment would hold up over the long pull. LBJ was also no enthusiast of mass demonstrations. To a man of his turn of mind, the Negroes would do themselves more good by using their energies and their resources working on their politicians to get beneficial legislation.”

And yet more controversy

It is true, as some critics have pointed out, that Johnson had asked his acting attorney general to work on black voting rights in mid-1964. As Goldman noted, though: “The assignment was long-range and was to be kept out of the press. Lyndon Johnson had no intention of handing Barry Goldwater more southern votes in the election of 1964.” Turner Catledge, editor of the New York Times, had a conversation with Johnson in December 1964 in which Johnson expressed his intention to avoid forcing the south to accept civil rights: “He wants to avoid rubbing the south’s nose in its own troubles”, remembered Catledge. “He thinks the ‘good people’ of the south have suffered quite a bit.”

By 4 February 1965, after King and others had been arrested, Johnson was still dodging press questions on whether he intended to use troops to protect demonstrators in Selma, arguing that anyone concerned with voting rights should use the courts to enforce the Civil Rights Act. “Because Johnson evaded the issue, King now publicly declared his intention to press for a voting rights law,” wrote one of Johnson’s biographers, Robert Dallek. The film does not, as Califano alleges, suggest that Johnson was “only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965”. It suggests that he attempted to delay putting legislation before Congress for political reasons and that he tried to avert a public showdown between King and the governor of Alabama, George Wallace (played by Tim Roth). This is accurate.

Impact

Selma does a magnificent job of recreating important historical scenes, such as the events of 7 March 1965 – known as Bloody Sunday – in which Alabama state troops and local police attacked peaceful marchers. “The whole nation was sickened by the pictures of that wild melee,” wrote King’s widow Coretta Scott King. “Tear gas, clubs, horsemen slashing with bullwhips like the Russian czar’s infamous Cossacks, and deputies, using electric cattle prods, chasing fleeing men, women, and children all the way back to Brown’s Chapel.”

Unfortunately, the massive stink kicked up by Selma’s selectively-informed detractors may have helped fulfil Califano’s exhortation that “the movie should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards season”. Selma has been roundly snubbed by the Baftas and the Oscars. To be fair, it has shortcomings, though they’re not to do with history. It’s occasionally heavy-handed, filming Johnson and King arguing with a portrait of ambivalent slaveholding president George Washington wedged between them. It includes too many minor characters who don’t really get to play out their stories. The end credits are a bit naff. These criticisms are extremely minor and are easily outweighed by its virtues. Meanwhile, David Oyelowo’s absence from the best actor lists this year is nothing short of a scandal.

Dialogue

In the screenplay, all of King’s fabulously distinctive phrases had to be unpicked and convincingly respun. His speeches remain under copyright, and his famously litigious estate has licensed the film rights exclusively to Dreamworks and Warner Bros for a biopic of King being developed by Steven Spielberg – so director Ava DuVernay could not use any of King’s own words. The script is a triumph of subtle rewriting.

Balance

Selma is ultimately balanced on Johnson, letting him have his moment of glory with the best speech of his presidency, “We shall overcome” – written for him by the brilliant Richard Goodwin, who historical film fans may remember from Quiz Show. It is also balanced on King, revealing his flaws as well as his strengths. In one of its best scenes, his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) confronts him about his frequent extramarital affairs. He emerges from the film as a hero – but not a saint.

Verdict

Selma is a well-researched, accomplished and fair-minded biopic, set around a sensationally good lead performance. Don’t believe the hype.