Icon for worsening race relations, “SELMA” -myths to INCREASE hate

Writing in The Washington Post,  former Johnson domestic policy aide Joseph Califano criticized filmmaker DuVernay for ignoring history, and particularly for suggesting that Johnson set the FBI to investigate King.

“Selma was LBJ’s idea,” Califano wrote. “He considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted — and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him.”

One of the central themes of a movie rumored to be awarded with an avalanche of awards is the ‘bad’ LBJ, whom history records as the liberal icon of all time.

The civil rights legislation of 1965, Medicare, and the Great Society legislation give the LIE to the smear job.

Califano cited a transcript of a phone call two months before the marches in which Johnson urged King to generate white political support for a voting rights bill by seeking out “the worst condition that you run into” in the South. He said that Johnson wanted images of racist brutality widely circulated in the news media, which the film depicts as King’s strategy. He noted J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, not Johnson, investigated King though the latter tried to discredit King in a scathing letter recently posted by the New York Times.

Julian Bond, a civil rights leader who worked with King, praised “Selma” but took issue with Johnson’s depiction as an obstacle to progress.

That Bond praises a movie whose major point is UNTRUTH between the races at the pointy end of the sword tells us all we need to understand about the power of the lie, and the danger to an American society which paid with 360,000 Union Lives ( a number which equates to nearly 4 MILLION TODAY) to kill slavery, and saw the KKK emerge to be political power and NOW has become a joke representing IGNORANT LACK OF EDUCATION, all the while seeing a unified population in demanding each person here get EQUAL OPPORTUNITY.

I cannot tell you the way I am, as someone who WORKED voter registration tables after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, instantly SHUT OFF when I hear this crap, or that Eric Garner’s tragic and CRIMINAL (IMHO) death is part of a racial divide here.

Truth is not arguable. Those who attempt to argue by the emotion of a movie that the sky is green, deserve our excoriation and isolation, not an AWARD.

We have made a lot of mistakes here trying to GOVERN OURSELVES, but we PAY ATTENTION to injustice.

In THIS case injustice is being done to REALITY and HISTORY.

The inevitable result of such events will mean the OPPOSITE of what those who make a movie like Selma want. The division and grievance incurred on BOTH SIDES will exacerbate every division there, and find a new set cracks to exacerbate where none existed as the weak minded accept as fact, that which is fiction to make rich, the immoral.