Remembering Civil Rights: Selma, King and the broad scope of Black Activism

The 50th Anniversary of the Selma marches has once again brought the Civil Rights Movement into public view. The conventional story is one many are familiar with, and always a popular GCSE History topic, as its inspirational and moralistic tale of non-violent triumph over adversity resonates with a range of racial and social issues today. The Oscar-nominated film ‘Selma’ has brought a wave of immense praise and controversy, using artistic licence well to create a powerfully emotive work, whilst remaining largely accurate. However, the issues which can be found in public celebrations of Selma, and our understanding of its traditional narrative, are not necessarily concerned with what is being said. Rather, it is what is being ignored which seems problematic.

Both the film and the commemorations surrounding Selma were understandably dominated by the narrative of Martin Luther King’s triumphs and tribulations. Yet this suggests that there was only one successful way of achieving Civil Rights and Black liberation: the peaceful, gradualist approach that King learned from Ghandi and is rightly remembered for. However, this ignores the multiple forms of resistance to racial oppression that have been historically undertaken. This is not simply another case of teleological hindsight obscuring multiple possible outcomes, but a carefully orchestrated way of remembering a very complicated intersection of ideologies and strategies.

Annie Lee Cooper’s altercation with Sheriff Jim Clark during one of the earlier Selma marches is an interesting example. The images of her attacking the Sheriff were displayed across America in the days following her arrest. Both Civil Rights leaders at the time and film portrayed her actions as an aberration, an uncontrollable outburst of emotions.

Yet, as even members of the SCLC explained, not all who supported Civil Rights believed in non-violence. The 50th Anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination has brought his militant ‘by any means necessary’ approach back into the public spotlight. Yet the more mainstream and moderate Civil Rights Movement also had a long and controversial history with ideas of self-defence, most notably the large following Robert F. Williams gained in North Carolina for his advocacy of ‘Negroes with guns’. Popular representations of Civil Rights, however, would suggest that non-violence was not simply the most expedient approach, but the only way of achieving success.

The Civil Rights narrative is told by an easy chronology of events; Rosa Parks and the bus boycott, sit-ins at lunch counters, King in Washington, and white violence in Selma. Campaigners arrived in the 1950s, almost out of thin air, with easily defined goals: to end segregation and allow African Americans to vote freely. The problem with this story is that it overlooks decades of organisation preceding the Movement and figures such as A. Phillip Randolph, who had threatened to bring 100,000 protestors to Washington two decades before King if Franklin Roosevelt did not desegregate all war services.

The film implicitly suggests, in its discussion of John Lewis and James Forman, that such grassroots organising was entirely ineffectual. It is true that SNCC and grassroots activists had tried unsuccessfully to encourage black voter registration in the South, but their hard work convinced many African Americans that this was a struggle which required continual mobilisation and sustained action. Many other groups across the country campaigned for welfare rights, housing, jobs and protection from police violence, issues helpfully removed from the chronology of a story which reaches its satisfactory conclusion in 1965.

This also neglects the fact that Selma was a pivotal point in the splintering of the Civil Rights Movement. In the months following Selma, Los Angeles exploded in flames, precipitating dozens of race-related riots throughout Americans cities. Selma may have solved certain legal inhibitors of black freedom, but it also highlighted how no amount of legislation could eradicate racial inequality and violence entirely. The response was a new, more militant wave of black protest which implemented their own forms of garnering publicity and grassroots mobilisation, and achieved their own successes and failures. Yet we often prefer to forget the controversial legacy of Black Power, relegating it to Civil Rights’ ‘evil twin’, associated with violence and identity politics.

This is not to downplay the importance of King and his incredible work in mobilising national support for black rights. By presenting such a simplistic story of his efforts, we actually obscure the wide range of causes he fought for, just as how we ignore the more radical elements of his most famous speech. Following violence in Ferguson, protesters were urged to act more like King, with the assumption being that the sanitised image was the only effective one for black activists.

Presenting King and the Civil Rights Movement as committed only to destroying legal discrimination through gradual and non-violent means inhibits the range of choices available to black protestors both in the 1960s and today. It ignores uncomfortable questions about what ‘Civil Rights’ and ‘racial equality’ actually means. Yet the recent examples of police violence have once again forced America to acknowledge its own racial discord. Perhaps a re-evaluation of how we celebrate the black past can provide refreshing new insights.