Selma - Emotional Impact

I am wrapping up a week of vacation now, which I will write more about later.

Having some free time, I finally went to see Selma on Tuesday. I had a strong reaction to it that may have actually been multiple reactions. Since it is Black History Month, this seems like a good time to write about it. In trying to think about how to get everything in, I can't do it in one post, so then it gets back to organizational issues

I think the place to start is with the emotional impact. I had not read a lot about the film because I didn't want to be spoiled. I did know there was going to be a reference to the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing. It didn't help.

It happened early in the film. The way it was handled was perfectly placed. You saw the Kings preparing for and attending his Nobel Peace Prize reception, then the girls talking about how beautiful and fashionable she was as a start to their scene. After the bombing it goes to a meeting where one of the points made about the importance of voting rights was that if you are not registered to vote you cannot sit on a jury, and all white juries were continuing to acquit the perpetrators of terrorism and hate crimes like this. It was perfectly logical. It was also gut-wrenching.

I have seen the usual pictures of the girls, which I think are school pictures where they are in school clothes. I knew the four girls had died, but had more recently learned that another was injured. I also thought I remembered hearing "basement" somewhere. Somehow that led to a picture of girls in school clothes sitting in a basement, like maybe they were meeting after school.

No, it was on a Sunday. There were 22 people injured. I learned that later after realizing I didn't understand it. So when I saw one boy and five girls in church clothes - beautiful dresses, and so pretty - heading down the stairs, the picture changed. I realized it was coming. The boy turned back, and the last girl stopped, and it did not matter how close I knew it was, I was not ready for it.

I couldn't stop crying for a while, so if I am wrong about the next scene being King and Johnson meeting, that is why. It hurt so much to see it. It wasn't gratuitous, but it was enough.

One thing the movie did was remind me of the importance of seeing instead of just reading.

I remember once being out with a friend who was a young woman in the '60s, and she talked about seeing these things on television and how shocking it was. It was shortly after I read Abernathy's And The Walls Came Tumbling Down (I think that's why we were talking about it) so I had understood the strategic importance of being well-dressed and using passive resistance, and how that visual impact had been important. It is not the same as seeing it.

The movie showed that with the footage of the clubs and gas, but they also showed people watching on television, and I remembered my friend. One woman they showed weeping, and then volunteering, and of course that made sense that she would want to take action, but then I heard her say her name, "Viola", and there was that emotional thud. It was Viola Liuzzo. She was going to die from this. I knew something about her, but I didn't remember that it was the Selma march where she got killed. I will never forget that now.

I knew about the Edmund Pettus bridge, and John Lewis getting his skull fractured, but the image I had was of him in a hospital bed. Seeing him continuing to work with the back of his head bandaged was different. I read some comments from other people that seeing things in color made it different. Remember, there are a lot of people still alive who saw the original images in black and white.

There is a special impact that a moving picture can have. When it is put together in a strong narrative, it can be a very powerful thing.

If that leads people back to more books, that's great. There were a lot of people and names in Selma that don't usually get mentioned, but there is a lot more to know about them than the movie covered, or even could cover.

Selma reminds us that there is something there, and that it's important. That it is so timely doesn't speak well of us as a country, but perhaps that is just one more reason that there were so many tears.