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This essay examines the ethos of Black women in the film Selma (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2014). It argues that controversies, such as whether or not President Lyndon B. Johnson prioritized African American voting rights, can detract from the centrality of Black women's roles during that campaign. This claim correlates with Jennifer Fullers critique that many popular culture civil rights films tend to romanticize the relationship between White and Black women. Such romanticizing not only leads to happily-ever-after endings in these films, but further fosters the assumption that structural racism is a relic of the past. Juxtaposing salient scenes from the film and historical details, I explore the agency of Diane Nash, Amelia Boynton, Annie Lee Cooper, Mahalia Jackson, Juanita Abernathy, and, principally, Coretta Scott King. This approach honors the spirits and biographies of these women as well as invites contemporary society to revisit the unfinished business of the civil rights movement.
Media and film scholar Jennifer Fuller argues that 1990s films and television shows depicting the civil rights movement tended to romanticize that time as largely an errant moment from which American society had been fully redeemed.1 Heroic men and women of both races fought for colorblind laws that replaced bigoted customs. These films typically included a White character that was either down for the cause at the beginning of the story or was converted along the way, usually by someone who was Black and a social subordinate. More often than not, the Black and White characters would team up to carry the plot to either a victory over a social injustice or an epiphany about racial reconciliation. According to Fuller, most of these teams consisted of a White woman and a Black woman.
Curiously, Fuller sets a critical gaze on these films. Her concern lies not with the use of Black and White female characters per se. Indeed, film narratives that showcase the White female participants in the civil rights movement are not far afield from historical narratives, which include but are not excluded to: Anne Braden, Rita Schwerner, Virginia Durr, and a host of sympathizers from college coeds to housewives. Rather, Fuller seems to object to how the representation of fictional characters and the films themselves sensationalized the horrors of civil...