Last night I finally caught up with the movie Selma on BBC iPlayer. It’s a splendid re-enactment of the famous civil rights marches in the 1960s, led by the great Martin Luther King. The acting was outstanding, especially the playing of King and Lyndon Johnson by David Oyelowo and Tom Wilkinson respectively.
The film raised a number of issues still relevant today.
One was the central role of TV in telling the world what was happening. Without the cameras, King knew, their marches would have been futile. Once the attacks and beatings reached a mass audience, many whites became involved in the civil rights struggle.
Today in terms of immediacy, the smart phone has replaced the TV camera, with Periscope and other video systems recording just about everything. If King were operating today, he wouldn’t have to call in the cameras: they’d already be there, in the marchers’ pockets and bags.
But it was TV cameras that captured the October 5, 1968 march in Derry, and the assault on it by the police. What was shown jolted the rest of Ireland – and the world – into a realization of what was happening in our NE Nest.
But while TV images appalled white Americans in the 1960s, and propelled many into joining their black fellow-citizens on the march, the effect here was rather different. In the early days, a considerable number of Protestants/unionists were involved in the civil rights movement. But when police were shown attacking marchers, rather than rally to the marchers’ cause, the small number of Protestant/unionists, with the occasional exception, melted away.
Another moral issue raised in Selma was where responsibility for the violence rested At one point, Lyndon Johnson blames King and his followers: by taking his people into the unreconstructed south, he knows he is provoking white bigotry and violence. So don’t he care that his decisions mean black people will be beaten and even killed?
I remember hearing a near-identical argument made by …let’s call him a soft nationalist I knew, during the Holy Cross Girls’ School affair. He articulated what many unionists and some nationalists argued: if the parents simply took their children to school by a different route, there’d be no loyalist/unionist demonstration and the schoolchildren would not be traumatised.
That goes to the heart of civil rights. Do you put your own safety and that of your family first, or do you march and reject the implication that your actions cause violence? The easy thing, and the thing nationalists did here for so long, was to keep the head down. Watching Selma, I was struck by the courage of the marchers and how the same courage was called for in civil rights marchers here. They refused to opt for a quiet life when a public injustice deserved confronting. Sad to say their song ‘We Shall Overcome’ still remains a dream today.
There is a kind of parallel with the election stand off. Unionists are saying we are ready to go back to day to day politics and work through our “bigger problems” But these bigger problems are at the heart of civil rights for nationalists and have been successfully kicked into the long grass since 1998.
I hope Sinn Fein takes time to carefully and successfully explain this to voters. Unionists cannot be trusted to keep their word about the big picture – comprehensive recognition of the legacy of the troubles and our future rights.
The Black Civil Rights Movement still has a long way to go in America also.
I remember watching the civil rights marchers being beaten by the RUC, with many loyalist civilians joining in the assaults. ‘Policemen’ chucking rocks, no IRA in view. Of course the British government had to get involved although their colonial thinking populace just shrugged their shoulders and looked in an atlas to see which hemisphere Ireland was in. Plus ca change. When David Bowie’s Life On Mars was released I remember thinking the line Take a look at the lawman beating up the wrong guy was made for our situation. I won’t even mention the 10cc song Rubber Bullets. The media coverage played a huge part in framing the conflict in the collective consciousness.