The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 might have technically outlawed most racist policies in the United States, but that didn’t stop much of it in practice. When Martin Luther King, Jr. led the march from Selma to Birmingham, he wasn’t just making a symbolic act, he was deliberating provoking die-hard racists in order to force President Lyndon Johnson to pass a law that would help stop racism on the ground: The Voting Rights Act.

Ava DuVernay’s spectacular protest film Selma opens on Christmas Day; make sure to check it out. My review is at PopMatters:

Throughout the film, King makes no apologies for inciting trouble. His detractors in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), including a young John Lewis (Stephan James), initially resent the SCLC showing up in Selma where they’ve been working on voter issues for years. When they suggest that King is a publicity hound, he doesn’t disagree. To him, the motivating principle of nonviolent protest is not only its moral imperative, but also its demonstration to white Americans the persistent costs of racism and segregation. To do this, he and his colleagues seek news coverage, to reveal stories of violent repression in their morning newspaper headlines and evening TV broadcasts…

The trailer is here: