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Plot summary
In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. accepts the Nobel Peace Prize, and a Ku Klux Klan bomb kills four girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In Selma, Annie Lee Cooper is refused when she tries to register to vote. King asks President Lyndon B. Johnson for federal legislation that would let black citizens register, but Johnson says he means to spend his effort on the War on Poverty. With Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, James Orange and Diane Nash beside him, King arrives in Selma, where James Bevel meets the group. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover calls King a problem and suggests disrupting his marriage. Coretta Scott King worries about the work ahead, and King calls the singer Mahalia Jackson for a song.
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Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Selma (2014)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ava DuVernay estimated she re-wrote 90 percent of Paul Webb's original script, rewriting Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches because in 2009 his estate had licensed them to DreamWorks and Warner Bros. for a Steven Spielberg project. When negotiations between those companies and Selma's producers failed, she drafted alternative speeches that evoke the historic ones without violating the copyright.
- Selma was accused of falsely depicting President Lyndon B. Johnson as a reluctant, obstructionist partner of Martin Luther King Jr. who had the FBI monitor him; LBJ Presidential Library director Mark Updegrove and former Johnson aide Joseph A. Califano Jr. were among the critics.
- Robert De Niro, Hugh Jackman, Cedric the Entertainer, Lenny Kravitz and Liam Neeson were all confirmed for Selma in 2010 but did not appear in the 2014 production.
- Common, who plays James Bevel, and John Legend released the song "Glory" in December 2014; the protest anthem refers to the 2014 Ferguson protests and won both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
- Some Jews who marched with King at Selma wrote that the film omitted any mention of the Jews who contributed significantly to the civil rights movement, particularly Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who appeared in news photos at the front of the march with King.
