GELFAND’S WORLD-Martin Luther King, Jr was only 39 years old when he died, on April 4, 1968, of a gunshot wound. It is of sad note that his father, Martin Luther King Sr, himself a pastor and civil rights leader, endured his son's death some sixteen years before his own passing. It is appropriate that on the days surrounding the national holiday created in honor of Dr. King, we mention not only the controversy surrounding the Academy Awards, but something of more lasting significance, the remarkable memorial to the American civil rights movement known as the National Civil Rights Museum. [http://civilrightsmuseum.org/] It is located in Memphis, Tennessee, and is a story worth telling in its own right.
When most people think of Memphis, they think of Graceland and of Elvis. Tourists visit the original Sun Records, where music history was made. As a traveler passing through Memphis a few years ago, I took that tour, and I can attest that I found it interesting.
But I also saw a sign from the road announcing the civil rights museum. It was, at the time, a place I had never heard of, and it became a remarkable experience, the kind that some people refer to as sobering, and others might call profoundly shocking. Others just say it is moving, and leave it at that.
The place has recently been refurbished and reopened, so this account is a little dated, but the core message and story haven't changed. To me, the most interesting part of the museum was a long account of the history of the civil rights movement, something that actually goes back to the 1600s. It is a story that needs to be retold, because whites in this country are generally unaware of it, or blissfully forgetful. The story involves the fact that people and organizations fought for civil rights not only from the founding of our republic, but beginning a hundred years earlier.
The museum website describes this account as the U.S. Civil Rights Movement Timeline (1619-1968).
The history, as the title suggests, is much older and more extensive than most people realize. Slavery came to the Americas in the late 1500s and to the North American colonies in the early 1600s. Most of us know that much, but what we aren't taught very well is that this was not without controversy even then. Moral opposition followed almost immediately. Organized opposition came shortly thereafter, so that by the second half of the 1600s, there were groups and public outcries, particularly among Quakers.
In other words, it is wrong to pretend that slavery wasn't always a major controversy and conflict on this continent. Those who want to pretend that the Civil War was just something that happened over economic friction are living in a massive case of denial.
Or to put it another way, there is just no excuse for what happened, and it is incorrect to claim that people were not warned of the moral horror of legalized slavery, or of segregation, or of racial discrimination. Seeing it from the viewpoint of the victims is a stark lesson.
The NCRM tells this story as a walking tour complete with exhibits and texts. To some people, it will be morbid but important. To some it is just sad. I would suspect that for most of us, it is some of both.
There is one more aspect of the NCRM, its own story actually, and it is the part that gets to people. The museum was established on the site of Martin Luther King Jr's murder.
King and his colleagues stayed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis more than once, often in room 306. He was staying in that room and walked outside to its balcony the evening that he was shot. The owner never again rented that room, but instead kept it preserved. Through a series of events that you can read about on the NCRM website, the Lorraine Motel eventually became one part of the museum. Visitors to the museum eventually find themselves looking at room 306 -- not an imitation, but the actual room.
There are other shrines and museums based on the civil rights struggle, but I think none has quite the emotional resonance of this place. Some people find the whole idea a bit macabre, since the location is the site of a murder rather than some other iconic location in civil rights history. So be it. The experience forces the visitor to engage emotionally with the human element that went into the great struggle of the American twentieth century.
Addendum: The failure of the Academy to nominate anybody but white people in several important categories has not gone unnoticed. The centerpiece of the discussion is of course the film Selma. The satirical coverage of this slight presented by Saturday Night Live has gained a lot of attention.
While the Academy's behavior is surprising, it can be viewed as part of a historical context. Without trying to excuse the members of the Academy, we might notice that at least the Hollywood film industry is not actively promoting racial hatred the way it once did. After all, the first major American feature film was Birth of a Nation, the oddly titled epic made by D.W. Griffith in the year 1915. The film inspired a modern (for the early 20th century) resurgence of the Klan, and probably put the modern civil rights movement off by decades.
Birth of a Nation was based on a racist story called The Clansman, and was adapted by Griffith, himself the son of a southern Civil War officer. It was the most popular movie of its time. The first half is a fictionalized history of the Civil War, albeit history seen from the standpoint of whites. But it is tolerable as a storyline and remarkable as a technical and artistic feat. The second half is set in the post-Civil War south, and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. As one of my colleagues remarked after seeing a restored version of that second half, "I had forgotten how revolting it is." Since there have been library shelves filled with books about Griffith, I will simply refer you to Roger Ebert's excellent discussion.
And then there was Gone With the Wind, which depicts slaves and former slaves in a way that should generate cringes in a modern audience. What's curious is that you can find parallels between Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation.
This all leads to a fact that has remained all but unknown to white audiences of the modern era. Early Hollywood reflected the culture from which it arose, and the product of widespread segregation was that an alternative minority cinema developed. The foremost director and writer was Oscar Micheaux, who made many films, including a 1919 feature, Within Our Gates, that is considered an answer to Birth of a Nation. Birth of a Nation remains famous in American history, while Micheaux's work is largely neglected. Micheaux told the story of a lynching seen from the victim's perspective and showed the suffering and struggle that was the routine part of a racist society. In this sense, Micheaux pioneered the use of film as a civil rights tool nearly a century before the modern wave of films showing the history of slavery. Filmmakers and historians have only recently begun to retell the Micheaux story as a significant part of our Hollywood history and of film history in general.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch and can be reached at [email protected])
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CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 6
Pub: Jan 20, 2015
