It illustrated a lot of points for me in my belief in how successful the civil rights movement of the 1960s was. Mainly TV helped to advance the causes especially since many southern politicians and law enforcement proved to be very aggressive in combating the civil rights activism. Many people risked their lives and bodies for what was right for all Americans.
It's wrong to make it onerous for American citizens to be able to vote and have a voice in their own communities. It's onerous make a certain segment of the population to sit in the back of the bus. It's certainly onerous to have separate classrooms for Americans of different ethnicitis and even more to insure one group had a better education than the other.
I could go on & on, but the point I wanted to make is that in attempting to keep the system as it was the American people of the 1960s saw how brutal and violent it was. There were forces in Selma, Alabama who fought to keep the system that existed then. We could also theorize something else was going on in the lives of these law enforcement personnel that caused them to brutalize unarmed citizens.
Off of the front-line, the southern politicians knew this would become a political or PR nightmare. And we need not worry about only then Governor George Wallace, then President Lyndon Johnson who was clearly engaged with the civil rights movement wanted to move forward with other political objectives. In the end he had been forced to move voting rights forward instead of finding himself on the wrong side.
Perhaps in the end regardless of how many heads police cracked open and regardless of how the KKK terrorized the Black populations of the south the end was near for the south as they knew it. No aggression would change the tide and if the world was watching on TV - with only three major channels and no 24/7 news networks - perhaps all they did was make themselves villains.
Having seen this film at Ford City - which is my first visit there since the 1990s - it was a great time to pay a visit in a theater that had been recently refurbished. A great movie based on history and of course a reminder of where we have gone and what it takes to make changes in America.
