(warning - some disturbing, realistic, violent scenes)...

here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020072/

I am not certain whether my wife and I will see the movie.

We attended the final performance of the play The Great Society at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in October. The play is the second part, with All the Way, of a chronicle of the presidency of LBJ by playwright Robert Schenkkan. The first play began with administering the oath of office on Air Force One, focused on the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and ended with the election in 1964. The second play is about the passage of The Great Society programs...voting rights, immigration reform, funding for education, the war on poverty, and healthcare reform with medicare and medicaid...but that is all played out against the stark backdrop of growing racial tensions, urban riots, and ...the elephant on the table... the Vietnam War
(at almost every pause in the action of the play, the growing numbers of war dead and wounded were display on the screen at the back of the stage).

Violence was clearly portrayed in The Great Society...but theatre violence is not always the same as movie violence: it doesn't have to overwhelm with crowds and noise, or repeat the whole story in gory detail, it can be subtle and thought provoking but still elicit the same emotional response.

For example, portraying the Watts riots on an individual level:

A young man in Watts, CA is brutally handled by the Highway Patrol, as his friends protest.

Or, looking into the soul of MLK as he contemplates the ghost of Jimmie Lee Jackson, the 27 year old protester who was shot protecting his mother and 82 year old grandmother and whose death precipitated the first Selma to Montgomery march:

The tragic death of Jimmie Lee Jackson haunts Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Anyway, when the film Selma arrives at one of the small local theaters, we'll talk about going to see it. I hope volume is low. The events of the past and present carry their own voices. Sometimes we just need to listen.

“How can I continue to try to persuade our desperate young men in these despairing ghettos to put down their weapons and embrace non-violence when their own country is the greatest agent of violence in the world?”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 4, 1967
Riverside Church
New York City

I appreciate it.

This pleases me.

I know I will not be able to watch this movie in the theater - there will be parts where I will have to walk away, where I will be screaming and crying. But I want to see this movie!

I knew that bridge before the March on Montgomery. My great grandfather retired to Selma and bought a house just a few blocks south of the bridge on River Street. I never knew him, but after he died, a number of his children, my great aunts and uncles, lived there. Some had never married, some moved back into the family home when they were widowed. I remember five or six of those elderly people sharing the house. Every summer when we'd drive up to visit my grandparents in the county just north of Selma, we'd stop by and visit the aunts and uncles.

So the year of the March when that bridge I had associated with happy family visits was shown with all the hate and violence so starkly vivid even in black and white, it took my breath away and made me feel ill. My parents were not liberal but they had tried to not teach us prejudice so the attitudes of my Alabama relatives was alien to me. I could not understand why humans would treat other humans so badly.

Even in the trailer for the movie, when I see that bridge, I have the same dislocation. I've only been back through Selma once as an adult and driving over that bridge was not a pleasant feeling.

Another note - Corretta Scott King came from my Mom's hometown - Marion, Alabama in Perry County the county to the north of Dallas County where Selma is.