The 2014 film Selma follows recent Nobel Prize recipient Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the months following the initial strides toward desegregation. In the opening scenes, two separate scenarios of racially motivated crimes and inequality are portrayed ‒ four African American girls talking about how to do their hair are killed by an explosion while walking down the stairs to a church service and a woman named Annie is denied the right to vote because she cannot name every county judge in her state. Dr. King meets with the president to discuss these incidents, only to be told that they are less important than the more pressing matter of basic desegregation. Throughout the film, we are giving glimpses of various landmark events and activists,
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and not just the sole speech for which he is remembered. This is especially intriguing as I found many details, such as his arrest, to be new information to me despite the fact that I believe I have adequate knowledge on King’s life. In the film, I specifically noticed the cinematography and thought it was unique and added to the overall tone of the film. For example, showing the bodies of the four girls killed on the church steps “floating” across the screen and then subsequently being found on the ground buried underneath the rubble of the church steps gave me goosebumps and really struck a chord with me personally. Furthermore, I found the scene where Annie is attempting to register to vote particularly shocking because she was asked questions that I, as an American citizen born and raised in the states, could not answer. This truly served to show me just how unfair laws were to African Americans, even under the guise and pretenses of “separate but equal” and legally granting voting rights with the fifteenth amendment. As a whole, I felt that this movie solidified exactly why African Americans had to continue to fight for their basic rights, even after the federal government had technically granted them, as well as the true importance of Dr. King in the civil rights
and not just the sole speech for which he is remembered. This is especially intriguing as I found many details, such as his arrest, to be new information to me despite the fact that I believe I have adequate knowledge on King’s life. In the film, I specifically noticed the cinematography and thought it was unique and added to the overall tone of the film. For example, showing the bodies of the four girls killed on the church steps “floating” across the screen and then subsequently being found on the ground buried underneath the rubble of the church steps gave me goosebumps and really struck a chord with me personally. Furthermore, I found the scene where Annie is attempting to register to vote particularly shocking because she was asked questions that I, as an American citizen born and raised in the states, could not answer. This truly served to show me just how unfair laws were to African Americans, even under the guise and pretenses of “separate but equal” and legally granting voting rights with the fifteenth amendment. As a whole, I felt that this movie solidified exactly why African Americans had to continue to fight for their basic rights, even after the federal government had technically granted them, as well as the true importance of Dr. King in the civil rights