Selma has won nearly unanimous praise from film critics… partly for it’s unflinching look at King as a true radical who upset… the whole political establishment… In conventional wisdom, King was a beloved figure who worked with national politicians to defeat a fringe group of Southern racists; Selma upends this narrative by showing King facing off not only with Alabama governor George Wallace, but also the Democratic president Lyndon Barnes Johnson (LBJ) and his FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover… The FBI aggressively monitored King and other civil rights leaders, fearing their radicalism. “We loved the FBI,” joked Andrew Young at an event at the University of Georgia I once attended. “Because we never kept notes and they recorded everything.” Between the years 1963 and 1965, the FBI bugged at least 14 hotel rooms King stayed in, looking for “information concerning Kings personal activities” in an attempt to “discredit him.” ...While “Selma” focuses on King’s campaign in Alabama and does not tell the tales of resisting the Vietnam War or the Poor People’s Campaign, it is an important departure from the traditional narrative about King… We can only hope the film renews discussion and debate about the necessary place of radicalism in our politics, radicalism that was so nobly represented by MLK.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 13:41:13 +0000