Introduction: The Film and History of Selma, Alabama, 1965

Figure 1.

May Stevens, White Only, c. 1963. May Stevens.

Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

I

This Close-Up is devoted to the film Selma (2014), directed by Ava DuVernay and produced by Christian Colson et al.¹ Selma won the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Original Song in Music ("Glory," written by Common and John Legend) and was also nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Selma is a cinematic portrayal of arguably the most important episode in the twentieth-century civil rights movement, when African Americans campaigned for the right to vote. The film portrayed an event of enormous significance for the nation; indeed it was a major affair of state not seen in over a hundred years since the end of the Civil War when slavery was abolished, black people acquired citizenship, and men secured the right to vote.²

Historically, Selma, Alabama is the city where a struggle of epic proportions occurred in 1965, involving African Americans and their "allies for freedom" (mostly but not exclusively white people), who campaigned to get black people registered to vote in municipal, county, state, and federal elections. This site became the setting for their heroic effort to have the right to participate openly and freely in the society that governed them, to free themselves from the shackles of political exploitation, to eliminate racially based registration and voting restrictions, and to advance democracy in America. In seeking to exercise the democratic franchise, they were violently opposed by white segregationists, who were determined to do everything they could to stop black people from voting. The civil rights activists were savagely attacked, met police brutality, and had their advocates gunned down and murdered. Racist white people were determined to demonstrate to black people that they had no authority over their economic, social, and political affairs.³ The extent to which black agency manifested itself, if at all, would be restricted to intrapersonal affairs with friends, family, and in the rearing of their children. The white dominance of black people was formally codified in law, reinforced with the brutal application of police power, and cemented with tradition and custom, termed "the etiquette of race." The peaceful nonviolent advocates of universal suffrage were guided by a political concept which maintained that the right of leaders to rule was derived from the governed, which meant that black as well as white citizens should have the opportunity to decide policies and determine who should govern by participating in free, open elections in Alabama as well as anywhere else in the United States of America. Selma, the seat of government for Dallas County, on the banks of the Alabama River, was the location for a cruel, brutal, bloody struggle for democracy having enormous consequences for a numerical minority of corrupt, though formidable, segregationists pitted against a majority of politically excluded people who sought to end political racism and democratize a region of the county that constituted the most pervasive and visible internal government crime of the American body politic. This conflict resulted in a victory for the advocates of civil rights and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that aimed to eliminate invidious distinctions erected to stop black people from exercising their Constitutional right to vote.⁴

DuVernay embraced a daunting task in making a film fraught with much dissuasion. First, for courageously taking on a project of such physical magnitude and sociopolitical significance as the Selma campaign without having the vast material resources of a Cecil B. DeMille of yore or a Steven Spielberg of today, she invited cinematic limitations from the outset. The director's initial difficulties in resolving a host of matters involving Pathe UK, the overseas distributor, DreamWorks SKG, and Warner Brothers, along with an inability to secure the full use of Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers from the King estate among other matters stifled the project. Finally, Paramount Pictures agreed to the distribution of the film in Canada and the United States...