"Ownership of History"

For MLK Day, Charles Pierce on history as portrayed by "Selma." He finds the film's greatest strength is in being "a war movie." Weaknesses and poor choices fade, he feels, because—

... this truly is the first film that shows the reality of the war waged against the Movement by the forces of organized American apartheid that does not have a white hero at its dramatic center. ... Those movies -- from the egregious Mississippi Burning to the mushheaded The Help -- were far and away more false to the actual history than this one is. Given that long history, Selma's portrayal of LBJ seems less of an offense than what actually happened.

And what actually happened, and how it has never really ended, is what matters most—

... Selma presents an even deeper challenge to us, and one that is completely apropos to the celebration of Dr. King's birth today. To whom does the history of the Civil Rights Movement belong? Some terrible things have been done to it, surely. It has been turned into an anesthetic balm for white America, and Dr. King has been made into a plaster saint who never said (or did) anything that ever got anyone upset. It has been turned into a weapon against issues on which Dr. King surely would have come down on the progressive side. In one of his last interviews that he gave, he came out strongly in favor of affirmative action, which gives the lie to all those people, white and black, who like to throw up one clause from his 1963 speech on the National Mall to make him the ventriloquist's dummy for decades of clever and protean racism. If you can't see the line between the scene on the bridge, and the decision to gut the Voting Rights Law, then you don't want to do so and there is nothing to be done with you at all. Leaving the history of the civil rights movement in the hands of white people has not worked out well at all.