The Power of Movies to Change Our Hearts

By VERNON E. JORDAN JR.

'When I was a child in Georgia, my mother would say, “drink some water now,” and “use the bathroom before we go,” so that when we got downtown, we would not have to drink from the water fountain for colored people, or use the segregated restroom.

Recently, when I saw “Hidden Figures,” a remarkable film about three African-American women at NASA that takes place in the early 1960s, powerful moments throughout the movie transported me back to those days.

In the movie, the character played by Octavia Spencer tells her children, while they are sitting at the back of a bus, that she’s a taxpaying citizen and has a right to take a book from the library. I could hear my mother’s voice in Ms. Spencer’s character. When we sat in the rear of the streetcar, she would say to my brothers and me, “Just because you have to sit in the back here doesn’t mean those white people up front are better than you.”

But it was easy to get that impression. In my high school band, I played a beat-up E-flat tuba handed down from one of the white high schools. In 1952, my plane geometry book was a tattered volume first used by white students in 1935, the year I was born. The per-pupil expenditure in the Atlanta schools was four times greater for white children than for us.

Division has always been a product of assumption — assuming that our story is the only story, or that our lives are harder than someone else’s, or that people who don’t look like us don’t have the right to live and work for the American dream.

But no matter how divisive life in this country may become, the movie theater has always been a place where we can rediscover what unites us. That remains true today. And it helps that audiences are more diverse than ever, not just in terms of what they look like, but in how they have experienced their lives.

When I took my grandchildren to see “Hidden Figures,” the idea that black people had to use separate bathrooms and ride in the back of the bus seemed unimaginable to them.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/opinion/sunday/the-power-of-movies-to-change-our-hearts.html?