Expanding on Selma and the Politics of Martin Luther King Jr.
by Danny Haiphong
“In the final analysis, US imperialism controls the corporate media and the survival of the ruling order is predicated on distortions of history.”
I recently watched the Hollywood picture Selma to confirm whether or not the movie was as progressive as many independent journalists made it out to be. It wasn't. As usual, history was branded in the interests of the corporate class behind the big screen. BAR editor Glen Ford laid out the historical inaccuracies of the film last week. This week, I detail the ways in which the politics of both King and the movement were derailed and defamed by the corporate producers of Selma.
SNCC was demonized throughout the film. James Forman was painted as childish and immature. Stokely Carmichael was nowhere to be found, nor were SNCC's voter registration drives or grassroots work that drew King to Selma in the first place. Black women, like Coretta Scott King, were relegated to spectator roles. Malcolm X was given a few seconds of the film to plead to Coretta Scott King that he had changed and was no longer hostile to the "non-violent" actors in the movement.
Selma not only minimized Malcolm and SNCC but also omitted key developments of the period. The Johnson Administration was in the midst of an imperialist war in Vietnam and understood it had to appease broad sections of the Black Freedom Movement to win support. Washington calculated that the cost of war was going to worsen the exploitation for oppressed people in the US. The administration feared capitalist (and white supremacist) crisis would ignite fire into the Black rebellions already underway and worked quickly to pass legislation like the War on Poverty to stifle resistance. Johnson followed up this up by doing what the Kennedy's had approved of in the prior administration: reporting militant Black leaders to be exterminated (including King) and replacing them with poverty-pimps and opportunists.
It should come as no surprise that Selma concluded by promoting King as a peaceful pacifist who led a movement that gave individual leaders like John Lewis a seat at the table of US imperialism. This is typical Hollywood practice. If Selma were true to historical reality, the film would show that the so-called "non-violent" Black Freedom Movement was never without armed self-defense. Black women armed themselves for protection against sexual assaults by cops and the Klan and Black people protected their loved ones from white supremacist terror. A popular example is Robert Williams and the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina. Williams organized a militia against white terrorists backed by the FBI. This is a fundamental example of how "non-violent" direct action wasn't antagonistic to the idea of self-defense.
“King was calling for a radical transformation of America's foundation by 1967.”
Selma paints 1965 as a period dominated by the SCLC and those sympathetic to its cause. While King's leadership carried a popular following, a revolutionary movement was emerging from the influence of visionaries like Malcolm X and Stokely Charmichael. The Black Liberation movement was born from urban Black rebellions. Black confrontation with the state erupted across the nation in response to the growing contradiction between the promises of formal political rights and the actual conditions of Black America. Black liberation movement and organizations like the Black Panther Party for Self Defense would attempt to channel this discontent into political struggle and revolutionary change.
Selma completely evades the existence of the Black liberation movement. Evasion cannot take away from how it was the Black liberation movement that pushed Dr. King into a political direction Selma only briefly engages in the film. In 1967, Dr. King denounced the Vietnam War. He called for an immediate end to the war and for the start of a revolution against the triple evils of materialism, racism, and militarism. Dr. King spent the rest of his life after the Voting Rights Act organizing the Black working class and fighting for the transformation of capitalist system.
At the time of his assassination, King was in Memphis helping organize sanitation workers and the Poor People's Campaign. By this period, King had already come to the conclusion that he could not condemn the armed resistance of Black Americans when the US government was the "greatest purveyor of violence on earth." He advocated for a universal living income and the redirection of military expenditures to fund the policy. In his last speech for the SCLC, King asked, " Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” King was calling for a radical transformation of America's foundation by 1967, a life trajectory that runs in stark contradiction to his image as a pacifist and reformist so repetitiously promoted by the US establishment.
Dr. King wasn’t a declared communist, but he was murdered because of the radical challenge his ideas posed to war, racism, and capitalist exploitation. The limitations of Selma lie not only in the omission of this fact, but also in its narrow revision of history. The collective movement for Black emancipation made Dr. King who he was. His political transformation is a history lesson in and of itself. Dr. King's early efforts taught the Black Freedom Movement important lessons on the true character of US imperialism and racism. The limitations of integration and political rights forced the Black Freedom movement to struggle deeply with the question of power. This internal struggle is exactly what pushed King to connect war, poverty, and racism together after he observed the rebellion in Watts.
“The limitations of Selma lie in its narrow revision of history.”
Imperialist institutions like Hollywood cannot be expected to portray King's radical transformation or the role the oppressed Black majority played in bringing him there. In the final analysis, US imperialism controls the corporate media and the survival of the ruling order is predicated on distortions of history. When King was assassinated, his political trajectory was antagonistic to imperialism. If he were alive in the 21st century, King would denounce each and every imperialist intervention, bank bailout, and police murder of Black people by the American imperialist state. He would call into question why the richest 1 percent in the world will have more wealth than the rest of the planet combined by 2016. King would declare a state of emergency to the fact that half of public school children are in poverty. And most importantly, he would make sure people understood that the evils of racism, militarism, and materialism are alive and well in the US prison gulag and every institution that determines Black life in America.
Selma is a disappointment to anyone who wants an honest synthesis of Dr. King's politics or the historical period that shaped him. However, an accurate narrative of history and politics under the conditions of imperialism must be articulated by the oppressed themselves. Corporate executives refuse to give a full depiction of the strengths and challenges of SNCC, the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X or Dr. King for the same reason that freedom fighters still languish in US prisons to this day. The Mumias, Assatas, and Leonard Peltiers are too much of a threat to the imperialist establishment to be awarded Hollywood films, even of the distorted type. The task of the developing movement against racism and capitalism is to ensure the true politics of Dr. King are a critical aspect of political organization moving forward. As the Obama Administration winds down with pitiful attempts to appease the masses with empty promises and reactionary policies, it is our duty to reclaim the true Dr. King and history itself.
Danny Haiphong is an organizer for Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST) in Boston. He is also a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report. Danny can be reached at [email protected] and FIST can be reached at [email protected].
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