David Oyelowo, center, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King in Selma.(Photo: Atsushi Nishijima Paramount Pictures)
We cannot leave 2015 as we have entered it.
But to become changed, we must focus on what we keep doing over and over and stop doing it.
We must focus on those things in the circle of history that remain unchanged in any monumental way as we pass from century to century, from decade to decade. Yes, life is better for black Americans almost everywhere. But yes, racism and discrimination still exist.
Yes, there is a problem with the way authorities treat some black men, treatment that, too often, ends in death.
Now, we must decide, each of us, who we will be no matter our color and the role we will play no matter our color in doing what America has never done: Resolve our issue with race so that we can make our cities, our country, our families, better.
And things will not get better unless and until we actually meet each other where we are, and as the people we are. We cannot dismiss each other's thoughts or presence because our skin color differs. We cannot dismiss each other's point of view or history or culture because we are more comfortable reciting only our own.
Anyone who needs help understanding this concept can get it from a powerful new film, "Selma, which director Ava DuVernay uses to help us see each other as people. In "Selma," she recounts three civil rights marches in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., to demand voting rights for black Americans. On March 7, nearly 600 demonstrators were attacked and beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Those attacks on the marchers, who were brutally rebuffed under the orders of Gov. George Wallace, were captured on television and awoke a nation to the injustice it had had the luxury of ignoring until that point. Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a second march, but halted it to avoid violence. Two weeks later, President Lyndon Johnson called in the Alabama National Guard, which protected about 4,000 marchers on the 50-mile journey for a third time. Nearly 25,000 amassed at the State Capitol to hear King speak. Four and a half months later, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Marchers cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. On March 7, 1965, nearly 600 demonstrators were attacked and beaten as they marched for civil rights, the first of three marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.(Photo: Atsushi Nishijima Paramount Pictures)
Before the act, only 130 of 15,000 black Selma residents were registered to vote. Selma changed lives. And many leaders played a role. What DuVernay, in making the first feature film about King, does successfully is recount a piece of history that wasn't just about black people, or about just one man, but was about a country still at war a hundred years after the death of President Abraham Lincoln. She found a single moment in time that changed them all black, white, young and old. Film critics have praised making black people real and not just a color.
DuVernay said some didn't get the point.
Director Ava DuVernay, center, on the set of Selma. As a very little girl in Compton, my Aunt Denise used to take me to the theater at least once a week to see movies, movies of all kinds, and I just caught the bug, she said.(Photo: Atsushi Nishijima Paramount)
"When I read (reviews of the film and critics) talk about 'Wow, it's colorless or it's lovely to just humanize black people, I'm kind of like, 'It's not colorless. It's colorful. It's filled with color. It's just that we don't have to talk about it every single minute of the day.' "
She said her goal with this film as well as the one before it, "Middle of Nowhere" was to offer a different perspective, something Hollywood is sorely missing.
Background, from left: Tessa Thompson as Diane Nash, Omar Dorsey as James Orange, Colman Domingo as Ralph Abernathy, David Oyelowo as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Andre Holland as Andrew Young, Corey Reynolds as the Rev. C.T. Vivian and Lorraine Toussaint as Amelia Boynton in Selma.(Photo: Atsushi Nishijima Paramount Pictures)
"There is something radical about seeing black history as told through a black filmmaker's lens," she said. "That's why there is a difference between '12 Years A Slave' and films we've seen previously. That's why it's important that Lee Daniels was able to tell the story of 'The Butler' or why Ryan Coogler could make a film like 'Fruitvale Station.' There is a thing to be said for perspective. It's not better. It's not worse. It's just that films about people of color have long been made by people who are not people of color, and that is something I intend to challenge. There is something very textural, there is something energetic, there is something emotional about having the perspective of a person that's actually within the story. So that's what I try to do."
DuVernay, who grew up in Compton, Calif., loved films as a child and cited a relative's influence for her breadth of knowledge.
"Some people love music. Some people love books. Some people love sports. I was always a film geek," she said. "As a very little girl in Compton, my Aunt Denise used to take me to the theater at least once a week to see movies, movies of all kinds, and I just caught the bug."
DuVernay became a publicist and a familiar fixture on the sets of movies she was helping to promote. But one day, something changed and she suddenly saw herself behind a camera.
"Something about being in proximity to filmmakers on their sets, traveling with filmmakers around the world, talking to them, seeing the process of crafting the film. ... I thought, 'You know, this is not magic. This is hard work.' And I work hard."
But working hard also meant working smart. And when you're making a film about one of the most famous and revered men in history, it means finding a way to tell the story that hasn't been told and, for DuVernay, serving a higher purpose.
"King is this ambient in my household," she said when asked when she first became aware of King's power. "He was part of the atmosphere during my growing up with my great-grandmother.
"She had a picture of Jesus and King on the wall," DuVernay recalled with a laugh. "It's the same thing. Jesus is not higher on the wall. It's just the two. And from my great-grandmother who lived until I was 6 years old to my grandmother to my mother to my father, who's from Alabama, King was a part of households in the black community."
She said her job, particularly as horrified and fed-up residents in cities across America have taken to the streets and to die-ins to protest the deaths of black men at the hands of police officers, was to show that a person who stood up to lead in crisis was just a man, an imperfect, troubled, sometimes scared man.
"My primary goal was to deconstruct King," she said. "I was not at all interested in making a story about a speechmaker or a statue or a street or initials or a catchphrase or a holiday or all the things he'd been reduced to. It's unfortunate because he was a very dynamic man, a very charismatic man, an intellectual. He was a man of faith. He was unfaithful. He was guilty. He was oppressed. He had an ego. He was a prankster. He loved to laugh. He loved to eat. He was a human being."
To show the human being rather than the caricatured symbol, she chose tiny ways that make big statements, such as shooting him from the back when he was speaking or from his feet up.
"It was important to look at all the photographs of King from that time," she said. "Almost every picture you see of him, he's center frame. There's a camera in front of him, whether it's the 'I Have a Dream' speech or anything else. So to deconstruct that, the idea of that myth, I had to move the camera to places you're not usually standing, behind him, places you're not usually seeing, like in the scene when he turns around on the bridge."
In that scene, King halts the march, before anyone can be injured, by simply turning his back on baton-wielding law enforcement officers and walking back through the crowd. Slowly the crowd turns and follows him.
In another scene, DuVernay deals with King's infidelity in a single moment, in a single exchange between King and his wife, Coretta.
"I've heard other approaches in scripts that never got made, male filmmakers who were interested in seeing the act, seeing the deed that is being described by Coretta in the scene," DuVernay said. "My job as a woman filmmaker is 'What did your wife say when you came home.' That is a perspective of a woman filmmaker. That is why it's important to have different people behind the camera, different people telling the story."
We cannot leave 2015 as we entered it. We must work tirelessly to help people see people, not color, whether we're black, white, brown or yellow.
Perhaps when people see perspective and humanity, they can soon see leaders and friends.
Contact Rochelle Riley: rriley@freepress.com
'Selma'
Opens Friday; screenings Thursday night in some theaters
Rated PG-13 for disturbing themes, violence, a suggestive moment and language
2 hours, 7 minutes
'Selma' is based on the true story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights marches of Selma, Alabama. David Oyelowo stars as Martin Luther King, Jr. VPC
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