let me hear your voice tonight (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexseanchai) wrote2015-01-18 06:30 pm
alexseanchai) wrote2015-01-18 06:30 pm
Selma
So I saw Selma today. It's powerful, it's triggery, and it ought to be required viewing for every high school student reading about the civil rights movement.
One bit that particularly got to me was right at the end, the text about Viola Liuzzo that showed during Dr. King's speech. The Klan murdered her a few hours after that speech. I hadn't known. She's standing there smiling and triumphant—not her victory, of course, but she helped bring it about—and—
And she was a Unitarian Universalist, Wiki tells me. Rev. James Reeb, whose murder was onscreen, was a Unitarian Universalist. (That I knew.) And I'm thinking, that's what Unitarian Universalism is supposed to be about—not the getting murdered part, of course, but the courage to, to be there, to help, to risk it all if necessary. Courage I don't have.
And the world gives more of a fuck about Viola Liuzzo and Rev. Reeb than Jimmie Lee Jackson. I knew Rev. Reeb's name before going into the theater. I didn't know Jimmie Lee Jackson's.
If you go—and unless the depiction of violence and death is going to trigger you, you should go—stay till the end of the credits, for the music.
I don't know what else to say about it. (I have the damnedest caffeine headache.)
ETA: Oh yeah, that's what else I meant to say:
One bit that particularly got to me was right at the end, the text about Viola Liuzzo that showed during Dr. King's speech. The Klan murdered her a few hours after that speech. I hadn't known. She's standing there smiling and triumphant—not her victory, of course, but she helped bring it about—and—
And she was a Unitarian Universalist, Wiki tells me. Rev. James Reeb, whose murder was onscreen, was a Unitarian Universalist. (That I knew.) And I'm thinking, that's what Unitarian Universalism is supposed to be about—not the getting murdered part, of course, but the courage to, to be there, to help, to risk it all if necessary. Courage I don't have.
And the world gives more of a fuck about Viola Liuzzo and Rev. Reeb than Jimmie Lee Jackson. I knew Rev. Reeb's name before going into the theater. I didn't know Jimmie Lee Jackson's.
If you go—and unless the depiction of violence and death is going to trigger you, you should go—stay till the end of the credits, for the music.
I don't know what else to say about it. (I have the damnedest caffeine headache.)
ETA: Oh yeah, that's what else I meant to say:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."Unlawful assembly", when the only people who brought weapons to Bloody Sunday 1965 were the sheriff and his people trying to stop the march. "Unlawful assembly" my skinny white ass.