Busted in New York and Other Essays

by Darryl Pinckney

  “Give us the ballot,” King had said at a prayer pilgrimage in Washington, D.C., in 1957, but voter registration drives in the South failed, and the federal courts offered no relief. In Dallas County, Alabama, for instance, fewer than four hundred black people could vote, out of the fifteen thousand blacks eligible. Selma, a segregated backwater of thirty thousand, was the county seat. Not a single black in the neighboring counties of Wilcox and Lowndes could vote. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been thwarted in its two-year campaign in Selma to register black voters. Marches had been banned.

  Together with Ralph Abernathy, the vice president of the SCLC, King arrived in Selma on January 2, 1965, hoping for increased confrontation with Southern authority. Evidently, Johnson understood King’s strategy: to arouse the conscience of Congress or the nation, he needed the attention, the cameras, which meant demonstrators risking arrest, sitting in jails filled to capacity, and worse. King expected bloodshed in Selma—his own. When the SCLC went into Selma, Marshall Frady observed, nonviolent direct action as the movement’s primary weapon was being questioned by disdainful SNCC youth. Malcolm X had been making fun of nonviolence for years, unable to comprehend the redemptive possibilities of struggle through sacrifice that King was so certain of.

  Selma opens with King rehearsing his Nobel acceptance speech, unable to tie his cravat, uncomfortable in formal attire. His humility and purpose are on display as he accepts the prize. The next scene is technically a flashback. Five children—four girls and a boy—in their church clothes are coming down a staircase, talking about hairstyles. The boy at one point goes in another direction. There is an explosion. This is the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963. We can make out the four girls’ bodies from above in the wreckage.

  DuVernay is right to stress the violence visited on black people. A white man from a states’ rights party slugs King when he registers at the antebellum Hotel Albert in Selma. Early on, King explains that whereas they’d made mistakes in Albany, Georgia, in 1962 and Albany’s sheriff had made none, arresting them with every courtesy, County Sheriff Jim Clark, who has jurisdiction of the Selma courthouse, is the primitive soul they must provoke in order to get the images they need, to dramatize the injustice that blacks are subject to.

  The head of Alabama’s state troopers comes to Governor Wallace with the information that King will not be at a night vigil organized by a group other than the SCLC, and the press won’t be there either. It is a chance to teach black people a lesson, under the cover of darkness. In the next scene, two dozen or so black people are set upon. Young, likable Jimmie Lee Jackson flees with his mother and grandfather down an alley into a diner. Three state troopers burst in after them. In trying to protect his mother and grandfather, Jackson is shot and killed. “We will bring a voting bill into being on the streets of Selma,” King said at his funeral on March 3.

  The film’s most crucial scene re-creating the violence of the voting rights campaign is a long one showing the teargassing and clubbing of five hundred demonstrators by Sheriff Clark and his posse on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday, March 7. The inspiration to march from Selma to Montgomery to confront Wallace came from James Bevel, a young organizer with a reputation for religious mysticism, who was moved to action by Jackson’s murder. Some sources say Bevel advised King not to lead the march. Selma has it that King missed “Bloody Sunday” because he needed to be in Atlanta with his family after the shock of the FBI tape. Branch says that King had missed so many Sundays at his church in Atlanta that he planned to tend to his pastoral duties before heading back to Selma that night. For whatever reason, King was absent.

  In the film, the demonstrators, many carrying sacks and baskets, meet a line of troopers at the foot of the bridge. At a signal, the officers charge the demonstrators. Some of the troopers are on horseback, wielding bullwhips. Journalists witness the attack as one demonstrator after another is run down in slow motion in the haze.

  In response, King issued a call for good people everywhere to come to Selma to bear witness with them. The second attempt to march to Montgomery was undertaken in defiance of a court order and included many white clergy from around the country. Again, in the film, demonstrators meet with a line of state troopers, but this time the troopers are given a command by Sheriff Clark to stand aside. King is shown at a loss; he kneels on the bridge in silent prayer, and the throng behind him follows suit. He then leads the marchers back to town.

  Some members of the SNCC were furious with King after “Turnaround Tuesday,” arguing that he had sold out his followers. In fact, his withdrawal had been prearranged with the Justice Department. But that evening, a white clergyman from Boston, James Reeb, was beaten and later died of his wounds.

  In the film, Reeb dies on the street in another scene of concentrated violence. A shaken King learns the news while shaving. (Jimmie Lee Jackson also did not in reality die immediately, as the film has it. King visited him in the hospital.) King is next seen praising Lyndon Johnson for having made a condolence call to Reeb’s family while wishing Jimmie Lee Jackson’s had received the same. Johnson had watched Bloody Sunday on television news with the rest of the country. The tragedy prompted him to announce his intention to introduce to Congress a voting rights bill, saying that it was not right that some Americans were denied the vote.

  In Selma, Johnson’s change of heart follows a conversation with Governor Wallace in which he asks him why he didn’t just let “the niggers” vote. Wallace (played by Tim Roth) is coy, angering Johnson, who says he’ll be damned if he lets history put him in the same category as Wallace. That meeting took place on March 13, but Johnson said immediately afterward that he had made it clear to the governor that the right of the people to peaceful assembly would be preserved. On March 15, Johnson stood before a joint session of Congress and declared, “We shall overcome.” In the film we see King and his coworkers watching the TV screen in silence, their goal within reach. In historical fact, some of King’s associates remember the occasion as the first time they’d seen him cry. Three thousand people left Selma on March 21, and their numbers grew to twenty-five thousand by the time the march reached Montgomery four days later. It was, Frady said, more like a celebratory pageant than a demonstration.

  We learn the fates of some of the film’s characters in this scene of triumph—that John Lewis, the SNCC organizer who defied his peers to follow King, became a congressman, for instance; that Cager Lee at age eighty-two became the first person in his family to vote; that Viola Liuzzo, a white volunteer from Detroit who had been moved by Bloody Sunday to journey to Alabama, was assassinated hours after King’s Montgomery speech while driving black demonstrators back to Selma. Hoover had instigated a smear campaign after her death, suggesting that heroin tracks had been found on her arm and that she was sexually involved with one of the black protesters with her in the car when she was ambushed.

  Selma stays focused on King. It only leaves him to visit the enemy camp, the anxious conversations among white politicians. He is in jail with Abernathy, chuckling that their cell is probably bugged, or he is in the kitchen of Sully and Jean Jackson (no relation to Jimmie Lee Jackson), courageous Selma citizens who played hosts to the movement unfailingly.

  King’s inner circle is there, and the actors resemble Andy Young at that age, or Bayard Rustin, C. T. Vivian, Hosea Williams, John Lewis, Amelia Boynton, and the brilliant James Bevel and his beautiful, fiercely committed young wife, Diane Nash. But the film does not have the time to tell us who these complicated and brave people are, never mind the insanity and rivalries around King. It has to be enough that they are portrayed, remembered. Oprah Winfrey fills the screen in her few scenes as Annie Lee Cooper, the nurse who gave in to the temptation to strike back in front of the Selma courthouse and knocked Sheriff Clark to the ground. Photographs of her being subdued made many front pages across the country.

  DuVernay was not allowed to use King’s ac
tual words. As intellectual property, his speeches belong to Steven Spielberg, said to be in the process of preparing a cradle-to-grave biopic. DuVernay told Gwen Ifill in a PBS interview that she had had to figure out how to infuse her work with the spirit of the times and the man. She “untethered” herself from the words, found a way to restate ideas, and “sharing these ideas is something that we should all be doing.” In that she succeeded. “Give us the ballot” becomes “Give us the vote.”

  I thought I would really mind someone else speaking King’s words; his voice is so haunting, still resonating through our history. But then I thought that David Oyelowo had found his own conversational drawl and pulpit delivery style, until the scene of triumph in front of the birthplace of the Confederacy in Montgomery. “How long? Not long,” King famously said in refrain, repeating his words from his unsuccessful campaign in Albany, Georgia. But DuVernay has Oyelowo orate, “Soon and very soon.” King’s Montgomery speech has been reprinted in anthologies of his writings. Because the speech is famous, we are suddenly aware that the language in the film is approximate, and that makes us wonder about what has come before. DuVernay and scriptwriter Paul Webb had to find a rhythmic refrain of their own, but they are saved by having Dr. King end on the stirring words of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Glory Hallelujah.”

  DuVernay also told Ifill that she didn’t want her film to be too dense. She didn’t want it to be “like spinach or medicine.” A biopic is bound to conflate events for the sake of coherent narrative. Selma reminds us that the involvement of religion in politics is not only right wing in American tradition. In the film, we don’t get much sense of King in his Gethsemane, the tormented man once found by an adviser on his knees praying in a closet. According to Frady, King needed the sin, the guilt, in order to feel cleansed later. In DuVernay’s film, King is alone only when he is pondering over pen and legal pad, writing.

  She wanted to say, she told Ifill, that he was more than a man who believed in peace and was assassinated. He was a radical. She shows him as a tactician who conceived of the Selma protest as the means by which he could force the president to act. Selma has the intimacy of a chamber piece but not much sense of the mass character of the Selma protests, of the thousands of arrests that had been made even before King got to town.

  King’s schedule during the Selma crisis was grueling. He had speaking engagements everywhere. And the drama that unfolded in Selma was not straightforward. In his account of Selma, Taylor Branch also tracks Malcolm X on his way to his doom, stopping off in Selma long enough to make an apology to Mrs. King for his public expressions of contempt for what her husband stood for (as he does in the film). And Branch keeps track of the progress of the Vietnam War. More than once Johnson had to deal with King after getting a debriefing on the latest disaster in Southeast Asia. The Voting Rights Act coincided with an escalation of the war in Vietnam, with the introduction of air strikes and combat troops.

  A film based on a historical subject, even a beautifully shot one, can remind us without meaning to that although reading in the United States is a minority activity, the book is still the only medium in which you can make a complicated argument.3 Imagine Henry Hampton’s documentary series Eyes on the Prize as just image, no script. We still need the voice-over of Julian Bond, among others, for perspective and context. At the end of Selma, DuVernay integrates footage of the actual march with her computer-generated thousands on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But for the black experience, the word is still chief witness. Selma was the worst place in the world, James Baldwin said.

  2015

  UNDER THE SPELL OF JAMES BALDWIN

  When James Baldwin died in 1987, at the age of sixty-three, he was seen as a spent force, a witness for the civil rights movement who had outlived his moment. Baldwin didn’t know when to shut up about the sins of the West, and he went on about them in prose that seemed to lack the grace of voice that had made him famous. But that was the view of him mostly on the white side of town. Ever-militant Amiri Baraka, once scornful of Baldwin as a darling of white liberals, praised “Jimmy” in his eulogy as the creator of a contemporary American speech that we needed in order to talk to one another. Black people have always forgiven and taken back into the tribe the black stars who got kicked out of the Man’s heaven.

  Baldwin left behind more than enough keepers of his flame. Even so, his revival has been astonishing. He is the subject of conferences, studies, and an academic journal, the James Baldwin Review. He is quoted everywhere; some of his words are embossed on a great wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Of all the participants and witnesses from the civil rights era, Baldwin is just about the only one we still read on these matters. Not many pick up Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) or The Trumpet of Conscience (1967). We remember Malcolm X as an unparalleled orator, but after the collections of speeches there is only The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), an as-told-to story, an achievement shared with Alex Haley. Kenneth Clark’s work had a profound influence on Brown v. Board of Education, but as distinguished as his sociology was, nobody is rushing around campus having just discovered Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1965).

  Baldwin said that Martin Luther King Jr., the symbol of nonviolence, had done what no black leader had before him, which was “to carry the battle into the individual heart.” But he refused to condemn Malcolm X, King’s supposed violent alternative, because, he said, his bitterness articulated the sufferings of black people. These things could also describe Baldwin himself in his essays on race and U.S. society. The reconstruction of America was for him, even in his bleakest essays, firstly a moral question, a matter of conscience. And at his best he simply didn’t need the backup of statistics and dates. When it came to The Fire Next Time (1963), the evidence of his experience, the truth of American history, he could take perfect flight on his own.

  Nothing breaks the spell cast by James Baldwin in Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2017). One of the things that makes Peck’s documentary so intense as a portrait of Baldwin, the engaged black writer, is that there are no talking heads, no one else making judgments or telling anecdotes about him or what he did. This is his public self, yet somehow deeply personal. Footage from fifty years ago has King, Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, the head of a white citizens’ council, and J. Edgar Hoover talking to the camera. Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss is a fellow guest on The Dick Cavett Show and doesn’t know what hit him. But the film’s attention is on Baldwin, his words above all others.

  There is wonderful black-and-white footage of Harlem in the late 1950s and early 1960s when we hear Baldwin’s words about missing his family while he lived in France, but the film has little in the way of biography, and it is not structured chronologically. For a documentary that hardly discusses his work—there is a shot of “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” the longer essay from The Fire Next Time, as it appeared in The New Yorker in 1962—Peck’s commitment to Baldwin’s voice is total. Not just anyone can hold your attention for two hours, which is perhaps why it does not matter how much the viewer does or does not know about James Baldwin.

  Everything he says on camera is interesting, moving—his face so expressive, his diction original and precise. In his accent, his way of speaking in rapid clause clusters, he sounds like Leslie Howard, the romantic British actor of the 1930s.

  Peck shows how riveting Baldwin’s writing is, like his speaking voice, “tough, dark, vulnerable, moody,” how inspired his ear. I Am Not Your Negro is divided into sections, and so the screen will say, “Paying My Dues,” “Heroes,” “Witness,” “Purity,” and “Selling the Negro.” Maybe they are meant to introduce different themes, but each section is composed of the same elements, old and new clips of police confrontations, shots of city streets at night or riverbanks or views of skies as seen up through the trees of different places where the restless Baldwin traveled. Moments of the blues alternate with show tunes or Alexei Aigui’s musi
c written for the film. It all comes together as a general emotional intensity, largely because of the sheer personality of Baldwin’s language.

  We have Baldwin, apologizing for sounding like an Old Testament prophet, but mostly we hear the actor Samuel L. Jackson in unhurried voice-over reading—or saying—long passages from Baldwin. He starts with a letter Baldwin wrote in the early summer of 1979 to his agent, proposing a book to be called Remember This House that would examine the lives of three black martyrs of the freedom struggle: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. It would mean a journey back to the South and painful memories, concentrating on the years from 1955, when we first heard of Reverend King, to King’s death in 1968.

  Peck tells us that Baldwin left only thirty pages of notes on the proposed book. (If the film has information the viewer needs, then Peck will impart it by means of typewriter noise producing white letters on a black screen.) Peck composed his script by drawing from some of Baldwin’s uncollected writings, maybe a bit from The Fire Next Time, as well as from two extended essays, No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976), both included in Baldwin’s collected essays.

  In the beginning of his film, Peck juxtaposes smoky black-and-white and Technicolor footage of Baldwin with high-resolution still photographs of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. A line from Baldwin heard later in the film is about how history is not the past; history is the present. Throughout, Peck makes connections between what is going on today and what Baldwin was protesting decades ago. His urgency had a point, and still does, the clip of a Ferguson, Missouri, riot says.

  We hear lines from No Name in the Street, in which Baldwin is remembering the fall of 1956, when he was living in Paris: