‘How long? Not long’: Selma, Martin Luther King and civil rights narratives

Abstract

ABSTRACTRichard H. King's article begins by examining the way Ava DuVernay's recent film Selma deals with the relationship between Martin Luther King and previous accounts/representations of the Civil Rights Movement, and how other feature films such as Mississippi Burning and documentaries such as Stanley Nelson's Freedom Summer depict the movement. This in turn raises the question of what the dominant narrative of the Civil Rights Movement actually has been, and still is. King concludes that it is the King-centred ‘From Montgomery to Memphis’ narrative. He goes on to explore the ways in which this dominant narrative has been challenged by, for instance, the SNCC-related narrative found, most accessibly, in Nelson's documentary and, more broadly conceived, in Jacqueline Dowd Hall's influential 2005 article ‘The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past’. Also, along the way, King discusses the relative strengths of feature films v. documentaries in illuminating the past. When comparing this with the written historiography of the Civil Rights Movement, he also explores the importance of the public v. private and the history v. memory debates for understanding the past. King's article concludes by examining the persistence of the Martin Luther King tradition in American politics and of Reverend King's reputation, as suggested by recent works such as David Chappell's Waking from the Dream.