Selma Film Analysis Reflection
Selma film by Paul Webb is a significant literary work that provides the narrative of Martin Luther King. At the same time, he organizes the disreputable marches in the intense period of the famous civil rights movement in America. In fact, Selma, in a perfect world, would be exclusively a depiction of the critical darker days long from the past, showing the American antiquity lesson, which concludes with encouragement that its dismays will never be tolerated, perpetrated, nor celebrated. Selma is so convincing in its portrayal of how nonviolent action can effect social change by being a story that offers both a past blueprint and also the means forward in pursuit of human rights.
Selma, in conveying how nonviolent protests can bring about social change, it demonstrates the intricate struggles that are faced by Martin Luther King and other Southern Christian Leadership Conference members struggle together with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s youthful members about the precise strategy to triumph a majority of Americans’ allegiance to their cause (06:17). According to Yeakey (159), the struggle for human rights seems to be not a walk in the desert as the audience can see the most critical point in the compelling drama where demonstration of a violent attack on the protestors by the Edmond Pettus Bridge police is observed. Further, in several meetings, at the White House, the King, who is the leader of the peaceful protestors, pressures President Johnson to send to the Congress a voting rights bill (Munro 121). The nonviolent protestors are concerned about how the President could fund a Vietnam war at the expense of declining to fight against the criminalities committed against the American people he is mandated to protect by the constitution (Yeakey 167). The struggles for human rights are further showcased when the energy of the leader of the peaceful protestors is also exhausted by a schemed hatred crusade by Tim Roth (governor George Wallace) and the J. Edgard Hoover’s (Dylan Baker) secret campaign to discredit the King.
Human rights have never be served in a silver platter as in the Selma, when Martin Luther King, Jr comes to demand for the early passage of the crucial general voting rights act. While President Johnson reaches an agreement that this bill is essential, he further declares that it should wait since not enough period has conceded from the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while the president has plenty on his serving plate (Yeakey 167). Such reticence, conferring to the Selma film, is the reason behind the King’s push to move to Selma, in Alabama, where he stages the protests series that later disclose to the nation, through the news media (Munro 121). The nonviolent protests showcase what occurs when the American blacks residing in the far South of the United States make some effort to voting registration, a systematic disenfranchisement, yet legally already granted the right (00:37). The audience is a position to see the moment when King’s team reach in Selma, Alabama, as they attempt to check into the exclusive hotel, whereby the hotel manager comes bouncing into the agitated lobby with a deceivingly friendly “Dr. King!”. At the same time, he proceeds to hit the King in his jaw (Munro 121). The audience cannot help but recoil at such an appalling act. However, the law is precisely what King and his team are searching for. One of the King’s team members says, “This place is perfect!” the idea behind this word is that the revolting racist brutality is not what the protestors have been seeking to evade, but it is what they have been in the hunt for display (03:54). While the crowd surges toward this particular building, they provoke the police who act like fortress guards, thrashing them with mere nightsticks, whereby the sweet old Annie Lee becomes cruelly battered to ground (Munro 121). When the incident’s photograph appears the following morning on the newspaper’s front page, delivered to Johnson, the president stammers in horror, furious at Martin Luther the King, whereby the public bigotry and violence explosion further muck up his interest on the similar voting rights act. This scenario is precisely King’s strategy. The entire Selma film has been framed as a fight of wills between this cunning moral activist together with the complacent and foot-dragging president.
Ultimately, Selma depicts the effect of peaceful protest in social change by offering a campaign chronicle of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in securing particularly equal voting rights through a heroic march in 1965 to Montgomery from Selma, Alabama. This great real nonfiction accounted for the rowdy three-month occasion in 1965 when Martin Luther King, Jr. led a perilous campaign to protect equal voting rights, especially in the violent opposition face (Arney 12). The epic march encourages not only the past peaceful protestors of human rights but also the current ones since the great campaign to Montgomery from Selma culminated in the President Johnson’s signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which in history America, is among the greatest significant successes for renown the civil rights movement (Arney 12). Hence, the Selma’s Director Ava DuVernay successfully provides the perfect story of how such revered visionary and leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and his supporters in the civil rights movement provoked social change that continually altered the history of the American people and the world at large.
Works Cited
Arney, Brianna. “Race, Media, History, and Relevance in Ava DuVernay’s” Selma.” New Errands: The Undergraduate Journal of American Studies (2017).
Munro, Jamie. “Selma’s Real Lessons.” New Politics 15.3 (2015): 121.
Selma: The Real Selma Footage. Retrieved from; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smx Sk3PzzI&list=PLAMlnxwxt_yHzqQnamEtP7U94elptaYsG&index=3
Yeakey, Lamont H. “Introduction: The Film and History of Selma, Alabama, 1965.” Black Camera 10.2 (2019): 159-183.