I experienced many emotions watching the incredible motion picture, Selma, this past weekend. There was pride. There was pain for every blow and every death it took for our country to heed the call of the civil rights movement and grant Black Americans the right to vote. There was confusion watching the perpetrators of such violence and rabid resistance. How did Selma’s Sherriff Jim Clark, Governor Wallace, and all the white folks that watched beatings for entertainment rationalize depriving people of human dignity? There was admiration for Martin Luther King which turned to awe of his leadership in the face of such high costs and a heavy burden on the home front and on the streets.
But gratitude was the strongest feeling I had and the one I couldn’t help but utter out loud. “Thank You. Thank you. Thank you,” I kept saying in the theater. Thank you strong, courageous, black, young and old, known and unnamed sisters and brothers for standing up so I can sit down here on a Saturday afternoon in all my opportunity and watch this movie. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has been my hero since I was a little girl, but something wonderful about this film allowed me to fully appreciate how each humiliation suffered by these brave souls, many of them everyday working folks, cleared a path for me. Without them, there is no me as I am now-the working class black girl from Baltimore who finds herself being educated by and working in some of the most elite institutions in the world.
King was taken from us the night before my 8th birthday. I lived forward, adopting King’s dream as my own vision, my calling, to become someone who would be the embodiment of the ideals he espoused. After King’s assassination, our country seemed to believe those ideals too; all around me the doors of opportunity swung open. The Baltimore Fire Department hired more black men like my father. Swimming pools were installed in our sweltering summer neighborhoods, and math enrichment classes were funded for middle schoolers. The government created minimum wage jobs so that 14 year-olds could work in the summer, allowing us to lighten the burden of our parents who were working several jobs.
I took three buses to a school that had been out of reach before because it was out of my district, and Pell Grants made it easier to pay for college. Then a wonderful white lady from Barnard came looking for girls with potential, and convinced my mom that I should leave the cocoon of Baltimore for the big city of New York. So many of these opportunities came through new laws, pushed by politicians who were voted in, or made possible because the opponents of progress were voted out (or knew they could be voted out if they didn’t get with the program).
But what do we do now with all of these victories won? All this progress? I hear black folks arguing all the time about whether there has, in fact, been any progress. Isn’tSelma itself an undeniable demonstration of progress for black folks? The film has a brilliant black woman director, Ava DuVernay, and features talented black actors. Some of the powerful backers behind this film are black. Together this team has produced cinematic excellence about the power of the people to change their lives for the better and expose the inhumanity of the police, local and federal governments, even the henchmen at the FBI.
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