Selma Fact

Selma: Fact or Fiction?
Some say Selma is an excellent historical film that brings the atrocities of the 1960s with the Black Voting Rights Movement to the big screen, while others retort that the film is a sad imitation of the truth, and the film was created solely to generate a large revenue in the box office. While the causal moviegoer will probably enjoy the movie for its theatrical achievements, as one dwells deeper into the facts and fiction of the film one realizes that while Selma is an entertaining film, it is riddled with inaccuracies. The film falsely portrays the relationship between President Johnson and Dr. King as argumentative. The Director, Ava DuVernay was not granted permission to use Dr. King’s own words so the speeches

DuVernay, accepting this fact, uses real footage from the civil rights marches in her film to show the magnitude of the March to Montgomery. This decision to use real footage leads to an accurate depiction of the atmosphere and resilience of the marchers. DuVernay sets the mood of the 1950s-1960s exceptionally allowing viewers to enter the fear-ridden and defiant times of the Civil Rights Movement. Despite all this, the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson in the film is inaccurately showcased as it takes place in Selma, and is portrayed as a quick and brutal death with state troopers gunning down Jackson in a café where he dies instantly. While in truth, “Jackson was shot in Marion, not Selma, on Feb. 18, 1965, and following complications died eight days later at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma” (Williamson, 6). In the movie, James Reebs is beaten to death on the day of initial turn around March on March 9th, 1965 after exiting a diner. When in Reality “Reebs and his fellow Unitarian Ministers, Clark Olson and Orloff Miller, were passing by the Silver Moon Café when they were attacked” (Williamson, 11), and “Although Reebs had surgery, he died two days later in a Birmingham hospital” (Williamson, 11). DuVernay while successful in setting the scene of ominous tension in Selma during the marches sacrifices historical

King delivering his Nobel Prize acceptance speech overlapped with the 16th Street Baptist Church bombings that killed four young girls in Birmingham, when in truth the “bombing occurred in 1963, the year before King’s Nobel Prize speech” (Lockett,4). DuVernay uses the overlapping depiction of the bombings in the film to set a stage for “racial tension and unrest in the South” (Lockett, 4). In spite of all this, the film does in excellent job at recreating the events of March 7, 1965 – known as Bloody Sunday. The movie shows “Alabama state troops and local police” (Tunzelmann, 9) brutally attacking peaceful protestors. Historically Dr. King’s widow Coretta Scott King wrote, “The whole nation was sickened by the pictures of the wild melee” (Tunzelmann, 9) and the cruel use of “tear gas, clubs, horsemen slashing with bullwhips” (Tunzelmann, 9) which reinforces the notion that the film does an outstanding job at displaying the viciousness of the police force during the