The powerful movie, Selma, opens with Annie Lee Cooper (played by Oprah) attempting to register to vote in Alabama. The white clerk asked her to recite the Preamble to the Constitution. She does it flawlessly.
Then he asked her how many judges are in the state. She answers, "Sixty seven."
"Name them," he says, sneering.
This film is all about speaking truth to power--as Martin Luther King, Jr. argues with President Johnson that it is way past time Negroes to be granted free access to voting, a right already on the books but disallowed in states like Alabama led by the racist governor, George Wallace, speaking from "the Cradle of the Confederacy."
It's about being beaten (and some murdered) for the right to have a voice--while white citizens of Alabama sneered and cursed and waved little Confederate flags.
The speech Martin Luther King gave when the marchers reached Montgomery is timely today--spoken in the film as we see actual footage of the marchers, white and black.
When I taught a course in rhetoric, I always included the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and the "I Have a Dream" speech. After reading these semester after semester for many years, I know whole chunks of them by heart. If I were teaching today, I would include this one:
"...Our society has distorted who we are.
From slavery to Reconstruction,
To the precipice at which we now stand,
We have seen powerful white men rule the world
While offering poor white men a vicious lie as placation.
And when the poor white man's children
Wail with hunger that cannot be satisfied,
He feeds them the same vicious lie.
A lie whispering to them that regardless of their lot in life,
They can at least be triumphant the knowledge
That their whiteness makes them superior to blackness.
But we know the truth....and we will go forward to that truth to freedom....
No man, no myth, no malaise,
will stop this movement...."
No comments:
Post a Comment