Selma: Black History According to Oprah | Black Agenda Report

Selma: Black History According to Oprah

22 Jan 2015

🖨️ Print Article

“Oprah insults Black SNCC civil rights heroes, but she protects the white, rich Kennedys.”

Like all historical dramatic films, Selma is a political work, reflecting the political views of the producers. Oprah Winfrey is one of those producers, in addition to playing one of the characters in this version of the Selma story. Her handwriting – that is, her conservative Black political worldview – is all over the film, which demands and deserves a political response.

For the purposes of this brief radio commentary, I’m only going to register three complaints.

Number One: the film is a crude insult to SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee workers who, along with a small minority of Black preachers like Dr. Martin Luther King, comprised the infrastructure of the civil rights movement in the Deep South. These hundreds of heroic young people, who had been organizing communities in Mississippi and Georgia and, yes, Lowndes County, Alabama for years, and who invited Dr. King to come to Selma, are personified in the film by one confused sounding, infantile behaving youth who we are supposed to believe is James Forman, the SNCC executive secretary who was, in real life, a Korean War veteran and former teacher and ground-breaking organizer about the same age as Dr. King. In the film, the James Forman character comes across as petty-minded, while Dr. King is made to seem like the only adult in town. Veterans of SNCC have a right to be hurt at being consigned to the dustbin of history by the likes of Oprah Winfrey. The rest of us should also be angry at having our history treated like a Saturday morning cartoon.

“King was seeking social transformation, a new system of living.”

Some people are missing from the film that absolutely should be in there. No, I’m not talking about Stokely Carmichael, although yes, he is quite relevant to the story. I mean the Kennedy brothers, John and Bobby, who were the ones who authorized the bugging of Dr. King’s phones and office and hotel rooms. But Oprah loves the Kennedys, and so the movie leads the audience to believe that J. Edgar Hoover and President Lyndon Johnson set out to surveil and destroy King because of his push for voting rights. But Attorney General Robert Kennedy signed the order, while his brother, who was then president, was still alive. Oprah insults Black SNCC civil rights heroes, but she protects the white, rich Kennedys.

Finally, near the end of the film, Dr. King is depicted as yearning for an end to mass protests, so that Black people could achieve real political power – quite clearly meaning the election of more Black people to office. As if that’s what the mass movement was all about, in King’s mind. We know that’s not true, because Dr. King said the opposite in countless sermons, speeches, books and essays; that he was seeking social transformation, a new system of living. Three years after Selma, King died, still seeking to revive the mass movement.

For Oprah Winfrey, Dr. King was just an opening act for a future President Obama, and for an age of billionaire Black TV celebrities.

As Prof. Abdul Alkalimat, of the University of Illinois, has written about the film Selma: “If the most militant person in the movie is played by Oprah, you know something is very, very wrong.”

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com, and sign up for email notifications of our new issues, each Wednesday.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

listen

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20150121_gf_OprahSelma.mp3

Oprah

More Stories

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Marisa Solomon’s Book, “The Elsewhere Is Black”
04 Feb 2026
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Marisa Solomon. Solomon is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and…
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
The EPA’s Zero Sum Game Surfaces a Dialectical Paradox That Should Be Celebrated, Not Decried
04 Feb 2026
The debate over the EPA's new math misses the point. The agency hasn't changed its values, it has simply stopped pretending to account for communities it was never built to protect.
Isaac Saney
Cuba Must Not Fall! Imperialism, Resistance and the Global Stakes of Defending the Cuban Revolution
04 Feb 2026
The survival of Cuba's socialist project remains one of the most critical holdouts against hemispheric domination, making its defense a global litmus test for sovereignty.
Black Alliance For Peace
On the Anniversary of the Declaration of a ‘Zone of Peace’, the U.S. Heightens its Murderous Assault on the Cuban People and Revolution
04 Feb 2026
Branding Cuba an "extraordinary threat" on the anniversary of a regional peace declaration, the U.S. has escalated an assault designed to destroy hemispheric solidarity and justify hybrid war.
Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement
Georges Ibrahim Abdallah: “Together, and only together, do we win.”
04 Feb 2026
After 41 years in French captivity, revolutionary militant Georges Ibrahim Abdallah speaks, offering an analysis of October 7th, global fascism, and the Palestinian resistance.