{"id":280,"date":"2015-01-19T20:18:40","date_gmt":"2015-01-20T02:18:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/staging\/1734\/?p=280"},"modified":"2015-01-20T17:11:53","modified_gmt":"2015-01-20T23:11:53","slug":"march-to-end-injustice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/march-to-end-injustice\/","title":{"rendered":"March to End Injustice"},"content":{"rendered":"

On this weekend of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, my wife and I spent last night watching the movie Selma<\/em> before going out to dinner. Produced by Oprah Winfrey, who also plays the part a Selma protester, the movie focuses on Dr. King\u2019s leadership of the March from Selma to Montgomery for black voting rights in Alabama, which resulted in 1965 in the passage by Congress of the Voting Rights Act that effectively ended the devious practices of southern officials in denying voting rights to black citizens. \\<\/p>\n

It is an uplifting movie, as one would expect, and I highly recommend it. The movie deserves more than the two Oscar nominations it received, but getting justice in Hollywood has always been a curious game of inside politics. It is not worth probing further in this forum.<\/p>\n

Like most movies about a key piece of history, one gets far more out of the movie by knowing something about the events it portrays before watching it. The movie, however, rises above such demands to deliver a powerful message about the realities of segregation and the uncountable ways in which it was designed to crush the human soul. Early in the movie, Oprah\u2019s character, having filled out a voter registration form, goes to the county registrar in Selma to register. The officious clerk first asks if her boss knows she is coming to the courthouse to \u201ccreate the fuss.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo fuss,\u201d she replies, \u201cI just want to register to vote.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then asks her about the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, which she recites perfectly. Determined to find a reason to deny her, he then asks how many county judges there are in Alabama. Sixty-nine, she says, and he grimaces. \u201cName them,\u201d he says, and when she cannot, he stamps DENIED on her application. She leaves, knowing that further discussion is futile. The only thing that will change the outcome, she realizes, is peaceful protest.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t go into great detail about what follows; go see the movie, please. Suffice it to say that, when the protesters in the first attempted march attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, local sheriff Jim Clark orders them to disperse in two minutes or face the consequences. They stand firm, and in short order, officers are flailing away at protesters with billy clubs, splitting skulls and breaking bones. Others on horses chase them down on the way back across the bridge, in one case letting a whip fly. All this is based on the striking reality of the brutality of Clark\u2019s deputies in the historic march.<\/p>\n

What anyone with an ounce of decency must wonder, however, even with the hindsight of history, is what motivates the kind of hatred and fear that causes men in uniform to unleash such violence against unarmed protesters seeking one of the most basic human rights in the world? How does anyone develop such animus against fellow human beings? I can almost understand simple cowardice in not confronting such people, but I find it impossible to understand the actual perpetrators of such injustice. For the life of me, I have never understood how any of them could reconcile such behavior with the Bible Belt Christianity they claimed to profess\u2014especially given that Christianity was at the root of Dr. King\u2019s movement.<\/p>\n

But the movie is about more than that. It is also about the epic struggle of King, played by David Oyelowo,\u00a0to motivate President Lyndon B. Johnson to accelerate plans to introduce voting rights legislation at the federal level. There has been a debate about whether the movie fairly portrays Johnson, though it is clear from all historical records that he was a master political manipulator who may well have resented what he saw as his own manipulation by this then 36-year-old Negro preacher. In the end, however, Johnson, who had only the previous fall won the Oval Office in a landslide of epic proportions, was not going to be left behind by the tide of history.<\/p>\n

To forestall action by Johnson, amid legal battles over the rights of the protesters to march in Alabama, Gov. George Wallace visits the White House. There ensues what I regard as one of the most intriguing, and surely accurate, scenes in the movie involving Johnson, who asks Wallace why he is \u201cdoing this,\u201d that is, using the powers of the state to prevent blacks from voting. Wallace pretends that he has no authority over the county registrars who are preventing blacks from voting, and Johnson is blindingly blunt and direct: \u201cAre you shittin\u2019 me? Are you shitting the President of the United States?\u201d He asks what people in 1985 (not to mention 2015) will think of the stances they took in 1965, but Wallace professes not to care. Johnson ends the conversation simply: \u201cI don\u2019t intend to go down in history alongside the likes of you.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, as we all know, he not only did the right thing, but by November 1965, with King at his side, signed a landmark law with strict enforcement provisions that permanently changed the political landscape of America. Those who died at the hands of racist murderers, and those whose skulls were cracked and bones were fractured by merciless Alabama troopers and police, had something to show for their courageous sacrifice.<\/p>\n

As I said, just go see the movie. If you think of yourself as a brave individual, match your courage against that of those who marched. You may find yourself aspiring to do better. I did.<\/p>\n

Jim Schwab<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On this weekend of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, my wife and I spent last night watching the movie Selma before going out to dinner. Produced by Oprah Winfrey, who also plays the part a Selma protester, the movie focuses on Dr. King\u2019s leadership of the March from Selma to Montgomery for black voting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[76,243,178,63,12,36,226],"tags":[249,69,245,247,241,248,246,244,250],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-civil-rights","category-government","category-history","category-movies","category-political-philosophy","category-racism","tag-alabama","tag-civil-rights","tag-lyndon-johnson","tag-movie","tag-oprah-winfrey","tag-oscar-nominations","tag-oyelowo","tag-selma","tag-voting-rights-act"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}