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Selma ?????
We have now seen the Oscar-nominated movie Selma. Our earlier allusion to criticism that sounded as though it was in an Oliver Stone category for historical fabrication is somewhat overblown. The film is decent to semi-decent cture, has received bad publicity for being the latest version of “Oliver Stone-ism”—the willful falsification of historical facts through film. Well, that’s putting it mildly about Stone—he actually just makes up entire “histories,” with most of his work actually coming across as deranged. In JFK, Stone posited the notion that Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was part of a coup d’état to kill President Kennedy. And that’s just for starters. What’s disturbing is that in our increasingly poorly-educated society, many people actually believe Stone’s accounts of American History. This is dangerous because, as columnist George Will has said, Stone is “a man of technical skill, scant education and negligible conscience."
We have not yet seen Selma, but plan to. Critics say the director has portrayed LBJ as an opponent of the Voting Rights Act and also as having ordered the FBI to wiretap Martin Luther King, Jr. We are not particularly fans of LBJ, but it is a slander to make either of those accusations as of 1964. (LBJ had worked to weaken Republican civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960, but he was growing and evolving on the issue.) By 1964, Johnson was leading on civil rights, as he did with the Voting Rights Act the next year. As for the wiretapping, that was the work of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. But RFK is such an iconic figure in the Democratic Party today it is embarrassing to liberal movie directors and activists to portray him accurately in this particular role—thus the shifting of the blame to Johnson for the wiretaps.
As a historical note, only 355 blacks were registered to vote in Selma (almost all of them Republicans), out of a population of over 28,000, more than 60% of whom were black. More than 10,000 white voters were registered. The county clerk was a Democrat, as were all the other 66 county clerks and boards of registrars in Alabama. The Alabama House of Representatives had 105 Democrats and 0 Republicans. The state senate consisted of 35 Democrats and 0 Republicans.