The movie ‘Selma’ has a glaring flaw

Joseph A. Califano Jr.
Opinions
The Washington Post
12/26/2014

Joseph A. Califano Jr. was President Lyndon Johnson’s top assistant for domestic affairs from 1965 to 1969.

 

What’s wrong with Hollywood?

The makers of the new movie “Selma” apparently just couldn’t resist taking dramatic, trumped-up license with a true story that didn’t need any embellishment to work as a big-screen historical drama. As a result, the film falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself.

In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea, he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted — and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him…

…All this material was publicly available to the producers, the writer of the screenplay and the director of this film. Why didn’t they use it? Did they feel no obligation to check the facts? Did they consider themselves free to fill the screen with falsehoods, immune from any responsibility to the dead, just because they thought it made for a better story?…

 

 

Read the entire article at The Washington Post.

 

 

Related:   Lyndon Johnson opposed every civil rights proposal considered in his first 20 years as lawmaker (video)

…In his 1948 speech in Austin kicking off his Senate campaign, Johnson declared he was against Truman’s attempt to end the poll tax because, Johnson said, “it is the province of the state to run its own elections.” Johnson also was against proposals against lynching “because the federal government,” Johnson said, “has no more business enacting a law against one form of murder than against another.”…

 

 

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