Director Ava DuVernay talks about the SELMA movie at Sirius XM in New York . (Getty Image by Robin Marchant) For me, the movie Selma provided 3 very important opportunities. The first was to celebrate the fact that the extraordinary story of the people of Selma, Alabama, had received “big-screen movie treatment” with director Ava DuVernay, producers Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt, and a cast of some of the most gifted actors working today, including David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr., at the helm. The second important opportunity was a chance to write about the movie’s potential impact on present-day campaigns to secure various gains won in the past but clearly placed at risk in the present. Due to the nature of the subject, I knew the planned article would require at least a 2-part installment.  However, a trip to Selma in 2009 to participate in the annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee had inspired an essay:  ...

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“There is nothing new in the world except the history we do not know,” said former President Harry S. Truman. Those words resonated with powerful significance April 3, 2009, when Mrs. Naomi King and Dr. Babs Onabanjo debuted in Savannah a preview of the film, A.D. King, Brother to the Dreamer, Behold the Dream. The screenings, sponsored by the Savannah Coastal Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were held at the Telfair Museum Jepson Center for the Arts and the Lake Mayer Community Center on the eve of the forty-first anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination. Whereas Americans generally--and appropriately so—associate the name King with the more famous slain civil rights leader and his widow Coretta Scott King, many are not aware that his brother Rev. Alfred Daniel (A.D.) Williams King also lost his life during the Civil Rights Movement. Although there is some debate over the exact circumstances of A.D. King’s death, one of the most moving moments in the film is fo...

“All this life and love and strife and failure––is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?” –– The Wisdom of WEB Du Bois The first half of the twentieth century in the United States and much of the world was an era when racial and ethnic differences determined even the most uncontrived actions. Stepping into a restaurant, boarding a train, engaging in sexual relationships, or running or voting for a public office were all ruled by notions of differences between groups. Race remained an element that tempted society in general and historians in particular to half-truths, shortsightedness, and outright falsifications. However, as W.E.B. Du Bois noted in his many observations on the nature of history, it was important to realize that the record of human interaction was much more than an account of entanglements between people with varying shades of skin color. It was also the log of humankind’s ability or inability to rise above age-old phobi...