The Dream Lives On

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

August 28, 2013 commemorated the 50^th anniversary of a turning point in the history of the United States, the “March for Jobs and Freedom”, a triumphant day when thousands embraced the path of peace and brotherhood that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed about.

The fight for freedom, respect, a decent livelihood and, overall, the fight against the inhuman scourge of racism is one that has been captured on film over decades. It seems fitting that in the year that the United States celebrates the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington to end segregation there are two very good films that address the tragedy that is racism, its past and its persistence: Fruitvale Station, which we have already commented in this blog (see post A Day in the Life), and Lee Daniel’s The Butler, written about in more brevity in the Fresh Cuts section of this blog. Both of these films will undoubtedly come up during movie award season, deservedly so, and should take home at least one Academy Award each. A third film worth mentioning that came out earlier in the year is Brian Helgeland’s 42 about Jackie Robinson’s struggle against racism.

Forest Whitaker and David Oyelowo in The Butler

I have, of course, other favorites that I would like to remember on this occasion. Films about the wound that was slavery and segregation in the United States, the struggle for equality; films that move us, which appeal to our basic humanity and that make us reflect on the absurdity of the color of a person’s skin determining their fate. It took years for black directors to gain control in films, but this art has now gained brilliant auteurs like Spike Lee, Antoine Fuqua, Lee Daniels, Ryan Coogler, Denzel Washington, to mention a few, and incredible actors like Denzel Washington, Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Forest Whitaker, Angela Basset, Whoopi Goldberg, Viola Davis, Morgan Freeman, Octavia Spencer, and so many others.

Sidney Poitier is a favorite of mine among the ground breakers. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner took on the issue of racism (interracial marriage) back in 1967, and Poitier amazed alongside Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in that film. That said, this actor truly reaches into our soul with his incredible acting and brings us some of the experience of black Americans in the sixties in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (also 1967) about an African American police detective who is asked to investigate a murder in a racially hostile southern town and, before that, in Daniel Petrie’s  A Raisin in the Sun (1961) , about the struggling urban Younger family.

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, In the Heat of the Night

Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) dealt with the issue of racism in the segregated south and the whole parody of “justice” in the judicial system there.  The film took Harper Lee’s great novel to the screen and presented a white lawyer, Atticus Finch, played by the amazing Gregory Peck, who looks to guide his children away from discrimination as he defends a black man, Tom Robinson, played in a sobering manner by Breck Peters, against an undeserved rape charge. The film is powerful and probably has helped guide many other court room dramas on the violence or racism, whether delivered by men in white sheets or in black robes, as one Pulitzer author put it (A Time To Kill and Ghosts of Mississippi come to mind).

Gregory Peck and Breck Peters in To Kill a Mockingbird

Alan Parker, despite being a British director, captured the essence of the white supremacy mentality and how it permeated every institution in the south  in  Mississippi Burning (1988) about the FBI investigation into the real-life murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. This was, in great part, due to the amazing acting in the movie. Mississippi Burning earned a number of Academy Award nominations, including best picture, directing, editing, actor (Gene Hackman), actress in a supporting role (Frances McDormand).  We clearly see the Mississippi that Dr. King described, in his I Have a Dream speech, as a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression.

Willem Dafoe in Mississippi Burning

Probably no African American director has brought the complexity of the struggle against racism and the black experience to the screen as well as Spike Lee.  There are many Spike Lee “joints” worth mentioning, but I will chose my two favorites on the topic: Do the Right Thing (1989), which takes place on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn where racism and bigotry explode and where Dr. King and Malcolm X are presented as polarized options, and Malcolm X (1992), with the amazing Denzel Washington playing the lead role.

I could write a whole blog on Denzel Washington (and maybe I will someday), but for now I want to mention him not only as an actor (of Glory, Training Day or Flight stature), but as a director. The Great Debaters (2007), the film directed by Denzel Washington, is most certainly a film to add to the ones mentioned. This is a film, like Malcolm X or 42, based on a true story. This time that of Melvin B. Tolson, a professor at Wiley College Texas who, in 1935, led a group of students to challenge Harvard in the national championship. It is an inspiring and moving film told in very unadorned film language.

Denzel Washington as Malcolm X

Of course there are more. A lot of them deal with slavery, segregation, the fight for civil rights and racial discrimination in the past. It is sad to say, however, that movies like Fruitvale Station continue to be needed in our present to denounce the sinister face of racism and how it is far from gone. As President Obama stated in his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, 50 years after Dr. King stood  there:

“But we would dishonor those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete. The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn't bend on its own. To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not complacency. Whether by challenging those who erect new barriers to the vote, or ensuring that the scales of justice work equally for all, and the criminal justice system is not simply a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails, it requires vigilance.

And we'll suffer the occasional setback. But we will win these fights. This country has changed too much. People of goodwill, regardless of party, are too plentiful for those with ill will to change history's currents.”