Selma and the Place of Fiction in Historical Films

2018 ◽  
Vol 142 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-123
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Hybrid Nature ◽  
Historical Film ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Historical Films ◽  
Moral Certainty ◽  
Historical Reenactments

Every historical film must contend with the possibility that its viewers will be scandalized by its mixture of fact and fiction, but no recent historical film has faced such pressure to justify its hybrid nature as Selma has, in large part because no recent film has taken on so momentous and controversial a historical subject: the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The renewed urgency of the issues Selma dramatizes, along with the film’s own commitment to the “moral certainty” of the civil rights movement, helps explain why Selma wavers in a self-defense that links the fictionality of its historical reenactments to the purposely theatrical element of the marches themselves. But politics are not the only problem for fiction in Selma, and to show why, this essay compares Selma to an earlier historical film, The Westerner (1940), that openly flaunts the commercial nature of its fictionality.

Selma in the “Glaring Light of Television”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Television News ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
News Story ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
News Program ◽  
American Press ◽  
Television Coverage

This chapter examines television news' reporting of the Selma campaign for voting rights that led directly to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Television cameras present on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday March 7, 1965, were able to capture the beating, gassing, and brutalizing suffered by voting rights demonstrators as they attempted to march to Montgomery. The uproar generated by that footage generated more support, volunteers, and moral clout for the civil rights movement. This chapter considers how one news program, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, presented the Selma campaign as an ongoing nightly news story, with particular emphasis on its coverage of the campaign's three martyrs: Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo. It also discusses the response of white Selmians in the “glaring light of television” and the commentary in the African American press regarding the television coverage of the campaign.

scholarly journals Preparing for 2007: Legal and Legislative Issues Surrounding the Reauthorization of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Benson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Political Empowerment

Forty years ago, civil rights activists across the country rejoiced in the passing of the Voting Rights Act1 (“VRA” or “the Act”). The Act was a crowning achievement of the classical civil rights movement and the culmination of a bloody series of events seeking political empowerment for African-Americans in the United States.

The Voter Education Project, 1962–1964

Poll Power ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Evan Faulkenbury
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American South ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Voting Power ◽  
Education Project ◽  
Grassroots Movements ◽  
The American South

This chapter explores how the VEP empowered 129 separate African American voter campaigns during this period, spending over a million dollars, and registering 688,000 black southerners. This chapter argues that this surge of black voting power paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Wiley Branton led the VEP during this period, and their support, with philanthropic backing, energized thousands of black civil rights activists across the American South. This chapter chronicles how VEP money and support empowered grassroots movements across the South, and how the civil rights movement relied on the VEP.

The Dream Is Lost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Maxwell Hayter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
City Council ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Electoral Reforms ◽  
White Resistance

The Dream Is Lost describes more than three decades of national/local racial politics and the unintended consequences of the civil rights movement. It uses the mid-twentieth-century urban history of Richmond, Virginia, to explain the political abuses that often accompanied American electoral reforms. The rights embodied in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 cannot be explained by separating the mobilization of black voters, on one hand, and federal policy directed toward race, on the other. The story first examines the suffrage crusades that predated the Voting Rights Act and how an organization called the Richmond Crusade for Voters mobilized African Americans a decade prior to 1965. As the Crusade mobilized voters, its members met firm resistance from their white counterparts. Local people and federal officials beat back the forces of white resistance by implementing majority–minority district systems. Although the reapportionment revolution led directly to the election of a black-majority city council in Richmond in 1977, it, too, had unintended consequences. The very forces that made Richmond’s majority–minority district system possible—an increase in African American populations in densely packed enclaves, unremitting residential segregation, white flight, and urban retrenchment—were the same that brought about intensifying marginalization in black communities during the twilight of the twentieth century. This story follows black voter mobilization to its logical conclusion: black empowerment and governance. It demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century urban redevelopment left a lasting impression on America’s cities. Richmond’s black-majority council struggled to negotiate the tension between rising expectations in black communities, sustained white resistance, and structural forces beyond the realm of politics.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971

2002 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Fuquay
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
Civil Rights Act

The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was heralded as a tremendous victory for the civil rights movement, the fulfillment of a decade-long struggle to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Along with measures against job and housing discrimination, the Civil Rights Act included provisions specifically designed to overcome the white South's massive resistance campaign and enforce school desegregation. Despite the continued intransigence of segregationists, these measures proved successful and white public schools across the South opened their doors to black children. With segregationists in retreat and the Voting Rights Act on the horizon, this was a time of celebration for civil rights activists. But this was not the end of the story.

The Gospel of the Sit-In

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Gershenhorn
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

During the 1960s, Austin lent his talents and his newspaper in support of the direct action movement in Durham and throughout the state. Unlike many other black leaders in the city, he immediately and enthusiastically embraced an early sit-in in Durham that began in 1957, three years before the more celebrated Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. He also aided a boycott of white retail businesses that refused to hire black workers by publishing the names of those businesses in the Carolina Times. This strategy was quite effective in forcing white businesses to hire African Americans. Austin’s efforts and those of countless civil rights activists led to major freedom struggle successes with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Cultural Disenfranchisement and the Politics of Stigma

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Myra Mendible
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Moral Geography ◽  
Exclusionary Policies ◽  
Physical Spaces

This article focuses attention on the pivotal role that stigmatization processes play on both legal and discursive fronts, that is, in justifying restrictive policies affecting ethnic minorities and in framing reactionary discourses in support of such measures. It argues that racial stigmatization is the key component in ongoing efforts to exclude Black and Latino citizens from full cultural citizenship in the United States, setting the groundwork for punitive and exclusionary policies aimed at disenfranchising and undermining their political agency. While legal documents record the rights and privileges accorded citizens within the nation’s physical spaces, the politics of stigma, I contend, maps a moral geography: it sets the contours and limits of communal obligation, disrupting affective bonds and attachments that can spur social change. As an instrument of power, stigmatizing processes today are helping to reinstate the kinds of policies and attitudes that the Voting Rights Act intended to redress, engendering a hostile climate for Blacks and Latinos in the United States and threatening hard-won civil rights and political gains.

Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cottrell ◽  
Michael C. Herron ◽  
Javier M. Rodriguez ◽  
Daniel A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Right

On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.

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