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

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
John Parker on Solidarity with Venezuela
19 Dec 2025
John Parker is the coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice In Los Angeles and a leading member of the Struggle for Socialism Party. He is joining us from Los Angeles to discuss…
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley , Renee Johnston , Jared Ball
Birthright Citizenship and the African World
19 Dec 2025
Margaret Kimberley was recently a guest on the Black Liberation Media program, Saturdays with Renee, with Renee Johnston and Jared Ball. They discussed the issue of birthright citizenship in light of…
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor , Ahmed Kaballo
Struggling for Sovereignty: Sudan After Two Years of Civil War
17 Dec 2025
After two years of civil war, Sudan is now the site of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. However, as in most conflicts in the Global South, colonial and neocolonial history are a large part…
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
The Turtle Island Liberation Front Warning for Activists
17 Dec 2025
Arrests of members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front are the latest in a decades-long effort to criminalize the left and to make examples of anyone who might fit the profile of being a "…
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
REVIEW: Radical Black Reading, 2025
17 Dec 2025
An end-of-the-year radical Black reading list from the editors of The Black Agenda Review.