There is a scene in “
To Kill a Mockingbird,” an otherwise outstanding film, that has not aged as well as it might have. It comes just after Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck, has seen his client, a black sharecropper named Tom Robinson, unjustly convicted of rape, despite Finch’s impassioned defense, and he is left to pack up his papers. The main, whites-only section of the courtroom has emptied out, but the people in the “colored balcony” are still seated, all in a posture of weary resignation. Little Jean Louise Finch, or Scout, has snuck up there, too, to watch. Then, as her father turns to go, the black spectators slowly rise. An older man, Reverend Sykes, played by William Walker, nudges Scout:
Miss Jean Louise? Miss Jean Louise, stand up! Your father’s passing.
The reverend says it without anger; his expression, on which the camera lingers, is one of sadness redeemed by awe at Atticus Finch’s courage. Peck
later saidthat, when Walker delivered the “your father’s passing” line, “he wrapped up the Academy Award for me.” (Peck won for Best Actor; Walker was not listed in the film’s credits.) For Scout, it is a moment of revelation. She glimpses what the scene suggests is the essential transaction of the civil-rights struggle: black Americans’ bestowal of loving gratitude on sympathetic white Americans who are willing to recognize their rights.
There is no scene like that one in “Selma,” the new film about a voting-rights campaign in Alabama in early 1965, during which three protesters were murdered, dozens more were badly beaten, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and other black leaders were imprisoned. Perhaps that cinematic absence helps to explain why, in certain circles, “Selma” has been greeted with outrage. The complaint is that the film is unfair to Lyndon B. Johnson—that it is a scandal, an insult, a lie. Joseph Califano, a former Johnson aide, in a particularly furious attack in the Washington
Post, asked if the film’s director, Ava DuVernay, and her colleagues felt “free to fill the screen with falsehoods, immune from any responsibility to the dead.”
Califano wrote that “The movie should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards season.” And, despite nominations for Best Picture and Best Song, neither DuVernay nor David Oyelowo, whose performance as King is an act of utter alchemy, are up for an Academy Award. (My colleague
Richard Brody wrote that he had considered a nomination for Oyelowo “a well-deserved lock.”)
Califano’s charge, in short, is that the film falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself.
In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea, he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted—and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him.
Califano, though, misrepresents “Selma” the movie and Selma the history. The movie does not, for example, portray L.B.J. as “only reluctantly behind” the Voting Rights Act, which would indeed be a gross distortion. (See Robert Caro’s work for the best analysis of Johnson’s stealthy passion for the cause of equality.) It does portray him as disagreeing with King about the
timing of the bill—which, to be fair, he did. On other points, though, Califano is simply rewriting history.
How, one might ask, was the Selma campaign, whose origins within the civil-rights movement are well documented, “LBJ’s idea”? Exhibit A, for Califano, is the transcript of a phone call between L.B.J. and King on January 15, 1965. The conversation, Califano claims, shows that it was Johnson who revealed the importance of voting rights to King (“There’s not going to be anything though, Doctor, as effective as all of them voting”); “articulated the strategy” for him; explained that it would be helpful to “find the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana or South Carolina”; and then “seal[ed] the deal” with a final exhortation about how much they could accomplish. King, in Califano’s telling, then hurried off to fulfill this brief, and returned, like a dutiful messenger, with Selma.
Karen Tumulty, citing Branch in a piece on the controversy in the
Post, writes that he “has his own film project in the works,” and had declined to comment.) As
Louis Menand wrote in
The New Yorker last year, “He asked King to wait.”
Other
critics of “Selma” have been
offended by the idea that Johnson wanted King, and a voting-rights bill, to wait in line behind the President’s other legislative priorities. But that’s exactly what the historical record shows, including the January 15th transcript. In it, Johnson tells King that he wants his “people” to lobby “those committee members that come from urban areas that are friendly to you” in support of Medicare and Johnson’s education and poverty bills. Those were the priorities; they needed to get through without any filibuster.
After those bills are passed, Johnson says, “
then we’ve got to come up with the qualification of voters.” It was the protesters’ attempts to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge that changed Johnson’s timetable. Their first attempt ended with a brutal assault by local law enforcement—Bloody Sunday. The White House sent John Doar, an official in the Justice Department (
who had earned the protesters’ trust), to try to talk King out of making the second attempt, urging him to abide by a federal injunction blocking the march. (This is the legal mess behind the exquisitely filmed moment in “Selma” when Oyelowo, as King, leads protesters to the middle of the bridge, only to turn them back.) It is ahistorical to insist that a film show how civil-rights leaders
ought to have experienced Johnson, given his fine intentions, and not how they did. There is no question that Johnson was deeply, viscerally committed to civil rights—no question historically, and, again, no question in “Selma.” It is also the case that the White House waited several days after Bloody Sunday before making an official statement about the violence, and that it did not, in that interim, respond to urgent requests for federal protection, including sit-ins at Administration offices. Sending in federal marshals or troops, at that point, might have been politically risky; it might have played into the hands of segregationists. One way or another, by the time either of those things happened, another man, a minister from Boston, was dead, and Johnson had set his staff scrambling to write a draft of a speech, and to assemble a voting-rights bill that he’d send to Congress sooner than he had planned.
The next source of offense is the film’s suggestion that Johnson at least abetted J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I., in his vicious campaign against King. Perhaps it is fair to give Johnson a pass when it comes to Hoover’s dealings; Hoover may have technically worked for him, but he was Hoover. At the same time, a recording of another phone call between Johnson and Nicholas Katzenbach, his attorney general, makes it clear that Johnson knew that Hoover was tapping King—“that must be where the evidence comes from … with some of the women, and that kind of stuff.” Katzenbach tells the President that the King wiretap was one that his predecessor, Robert Kennedy, had authorized, and “which I’ve been ambivalent about taking off.” DuVernay artificially, and somewhat clumsily, crams a decade’s worth of murkiness into the narrow time frame of the Selma campaign. The character most compromised, though, is not Johnson but King. The film is fairly merciless when it comes to his infidelities, which harmed both his family and his work. “Selma” is neither a demonization nor a hagiography of either man.
Reading Branch’s account of that period, it is revealing how distracted Johnson was by Vietnam. In the days when the scenes of violence in Alabama should have been his focus, he was in endless meetings with Robert McNamara about a secret order to begin a bombing campaign. “It was this crisis that had shortened his patience for King’s visit from Selma,” Branch writes. There is not much mention of Vietnam in “Selma”; in this, the filmmakers did Johnson a kindness.
Indeed, after hearing all of the pro-L.B.J. complaints about the movie, it can be disorienting to watch scenes like the one in which Johnson tells off George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, saying that he isn’t willing to go down in history paired with “the likes of you.” The climax of the film is Johnson’s address to Congress, in which he stunned the chamber with the ambition of his legislative plan, his invocation of America’s soul and its destiny, and his use of what had been seen as a slogan of the streets: “We shall overcome.” In DuVernay’s staging, there is no doubt that Johnson means it, and that what he has just done is epochal. Her film is fair to Johnson; the portrayal is multifaceted and respectful, and fully cognizant of his essential commitment to civil rights. What “Selma” is not, though, is cartoonish or deferential. Is that, again, the problem?
Maureen Dowd, in the Times, wrote about seeing the movie “in a theater full of black teenagers,” and worriedly noted that, in the scenes with L.B.J. and M.L.K., the young people “bristled at the power dynamic between the two men.” They would now see Johnson “through DuVernay’s lens. And that’s a shame.” None of the teen-agers would want to stand up as L.B.J. passed. Indeed, there is no moment in “Selma” where King really thanks Johnson or, Hollywood-style, puts his hand on his shoulder and tells him, “
You’re a good man.” If that’s what the “Selma” critics crave, there are plenty of movies that offer it. (There is almost such a scene in “Selma”—it takes place between two black characters, King and John Lewis, played by the excellent Stephan James).
At the time of Selma, Johnson was fifty-six years old. King was thirty-six; he was thirty-nine when he was murdered. Taylor Branch, describing the night of Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech, describes the frantic, late revisions—“the pale aides who raced between typewriters … a motorcade waiting to transport him to the Capitol.” In the limousine, on the ride over, Johnson read over some late changes to the text, which included “words of disapproval” for protesters who, among other things, “block public thoroughfares to traffic,” Branch writes. “Changing his mind, Johnson struck the latter paragraph to avoid the misimpression that marginal annoyance reflected his true feeling.” A few minutes later, speaking to Congress and a national television audience, a Southern President said, “The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro.”*
