Too often, these movies end up being more about the white ally than the black person fighting against discrimination.
I also don’t see the entertainment value of sitting through a movie that opens old wounds. I figured I’d get around to seeing “Selma” sooner or later.
When the controversy erupted over the film’s director, Ava DuVernay, not being nominated for an Oscar, it piqued my interest.
I hadn’t considered that “Selma” is the first major motion picture about King.
Like many of you (oh go on and admit it), I confused all those documentaries, TV-movies and films centered on civil rights themes as being about King.
After all, you can’t tell the complete story about the battle for school desegregation and voting rights in the South and not consider King’s influence.
But DuVernay went deep. She constructed a film that presented King as a real man, not just the symbol of a movement.
He was fallible and faithful, charismatic and insecure, blessed and cursed.
“I studied him. But certainly there was always more to know, and ‘Selma’ afforded me the opportunity to elongate my view of him,” DuVernay said in a recent interview with the Atlantic.