What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets right

[redstar826]

- He used the N-word and told racist jokes. He once said African-Americans were inferior to whites. He proposed ending slavery by shipping willing slaves back to Africa

Comments

[roseofjuly]

That is why I had no interest in seeing this movie. As soon as I heard the premise, I knew that the goal (or effect) would be to try to attempt to cast Lincoln as this great noble abolitionist who rose from the ashes to honorably end slavery, along with the support of other white people. It's notable enough that a movie that is primarily about the efforts of an American president to push through the Thirteenth Amendment does NOT star any black actors or actresses.

My husband and I were saying the other day that there's been a succession of historical films on pretty much anything from white American history. However, there are so many interesting stories in American people of color's history and nobody's making those movies. Red Tails is a prime example, but we were talking about how a feature film centered on Harriet Tubman's life and her activities in freeing enslaved African Americans would be really exciting and moving if done right. Olaudah Equiano's story would also provide a really interesting movie. The rise of black abolitionists and/or the debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B DuBois could be great. The story of the civil rights movement set at a historically black college like Howard or Spelman & Morehouse would be really interesting!

For heaven's sake, there's not a decent feature film about Martin Luther King, Jr. (Although Malcolm X did get a good one) or a significant number of films about the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s (race or gender). This list shows that there's a feature film about quiz show scandals in the 1950s, a movie about The Doors, the Zodiac murders and a slew of really important political happenings in other countries...but only one movie about civil rights (Mississippi Burning) and no feature film on King.

History is written by the victors...

[nesmith]

I would SO go to a movie about Harriet Tubman. She's been a hero of mine since I first encountered her in school back in second grade. Such an amazing woman.

[roseofjuly]

And see when I was in school, we only ever learned about her working as an abductor on the Underground Railroad. I didn't even know about her Union Army service until later. You could conceivably make a good movie about either period in her life.

[betray802]

History is written by the victors...

It was amusing at the time -- because we were 16 and collectively stupid -- but I had a classmate in 11th grade American History who was Lakota and Crow. This was in northwestern New England, where most of us believed we didn't have native peoples anymore. Witness the Abenaki struggle to get even state-level recognition. We treated it as a carnival sideshow curiosity.

This guy was the mouse in the back of the room until we got to Westward Expansion, then we could not shut him up. "Yeah, that's not really how that went." "Actually, what happened was ... " "That's not how my uncle the tribal historian tells the story." Finally one day he got so frustrated at all of us self-privileged white kids that he offered to demonstrate scalping, all he needed was a volunteer. (Lucky him, this was the early 90s, and he was pretty much laughed off. Today he'd be arrested for "making terroristic threats.")

My father used to participate in the yearly history pageant, celebrating the history of Lake Champlain. Because he gets a sunburn standing in the shade, he always got assigned to play an Iroquois warrior. To this day, he refuses to admit how howlingly racist the whole thing was. I brought home a history assignment on a "colonial hero" (who massacred an Abenaki village,) his face nearly exploded.

[natyanayaki]

Thank you for posting my thoughts and saving me a lot of time and energy!

[kitschaster]

I have always wanted to see Assata made into a film, honestly. It would probably be gruesome, but god I love that book.

[chibi_lurrel]

Literally every other character in Lincoln would have been more interesting to watch a movie about than Spielberg's Lincoln, but especially folks like Elizabeth Keckley who was involved in the Contraband Relief Organization and worked to help free slaves. The Washington, DC in that movie had very little relation to how black DC actually was back then.

[intrikate88]

MTE!

I just had no interest in seeing a movie glorifying Lincoln because... he wasn't the hero here. He didn't support equality in the least. He didn't care about respecting the lives of POC and making sure they had all the rights afforded to others. He cared about preserving the Union and its economic assets; 90 years previous, the US had been a breakaway colony from England, and he wasn't interested in watching the south be a breakaway area as well. I can't help but see his aims as being more aligned with the Manifest Destiny types rather than the abolitionists.

The rise of black abolitionists and/or the debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B DuBois could be great. The story of the civil rights movement set at a historically black college like Howard or Spelman & Morehouse would be really interesting!

I would watch the fuck out of that. Or, like, a movie made out of any of the Black History Month posts around here? I devour those posts because it feels like I'm learning secrets. THIS is the stuff that needs to be broadcast in Hollywood pop culture.

[roseofjuly]

THIS. I love the Black History Month posts. My favorite was the one where an artist colorized some of the era's most poignant photographs. I spent hours just staring at the photographs trying to paint a picture in my mind of what it must have been like to be a civil rights activist at the time...I think it's a bit easier now for me to envision it, what with some of the movements that are going on nowadays (Arab Spring, Occupy, labor rights in WI, etc.) I wondered...would I be one of those students marching in the streets, getting attacked by water hoses and carted off to jail? Or would I be too afraid, which is also a completely legitimate and sensible reaction? Or would I simply help out in other less visible ways? I mean someone has to post flyers and rent out the halls and basically do the administrative stuff.

It's that kind of internal conflict that I'd want to see...in a movie about young black people fighting for civil rights, the struggles to decide how much to participate, the fears of the consequences, the tension between people who chose to do more and the people who chose otherwise, and sort of the realization of the position of privilege those young college-educated people were in (kind of like that scene in School Daze when Dap and his friends eat at the KFC and get into an altercation with townies). Bring those pictures to life.

[girly123]

The story of the civil rights movement set at a historically black college like Howard or Spelman & Morehouse would be really interesting!

I would camp out Star Wars style for weeks for the chance to see that in theatres. It would be AMAZING.

Also, I agree with basically everything you just said here. It's the exact same reason why I had no interest in seeing the movie at all.

[roseofjuly]

My tent would be right next to yours, trust, especially a Spelman flick. I think the contrast between the reputation of Spelman as a "tea-pouring" school for turning out young ladies and the actuality of its students getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement is soooo fascinating, and I would love to see a good movie on that.

[poetic_pixie_13]

I think the contrast between the reputation of Spelman as a "tea-pouring" school for turning out young ladies and the actuality of its students getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement is soooo fascinating

Ooooooooooooh. Would you mind talking a bit more about that?

[roseofjuly]

Certainly!

Spelman's an interesting place. It was founded by two white women who intended the school to be a liberal arts institution and not just a vocational school. They also envisioned that the students would become pillars of their communities and forces for change in society. However, both founders and the immediate presidents after them encouraged their students to learn the domestic arts as well as the liberal arts, and women who graduated from Spelman were expected to go on to become wives and mothers in the black middle and upper classes and perhaps teachers and nurses.

So during the 1950s and 1960s, Spelman had already gained a reputation as sort of finishing school for college-aged black women in preparation for them to become the wives of the black men who were changing the world. Marian Wright Edelman (who graduated from Spelman in 1960) writes in her article "Spelman College: A Safe Haven for a Young Black Woman" (from the Spring 2000 issue of Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, pp. 118-123) that she did not want to go to Spelman because of it's reputation as "tea-pouring very strict school designed to turn black girls into refined ladies and teachers."* She also described the school as "a staid women's college that developed safe, young women who married Morehouse men, helped raise a family, and never kicked up dust."

So of course when the civil rights movement really started cooking up in Atlanta, the administration wasn't really happy with the idea of Spelman women changing that reputation to one of fierce, angry, strong, fighting black women getting carted off to jail. Howard Zinn was a professor at Spelman during that time (from 1956 to 1963) and in addition to getting involved himself, he encouraged the students to participate in the movement, along with other radical faculty members. He was the advisor of the chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee there, and the students used his house to plan civil rights actions. He himself said that although Spelman prided itself on that refined reputation, its students "were likely to be found on the picket line or in jail" for civil rights activism and that during his 7 years at Spelman, the "most interesting, exciting, most educational time for [him]," he learned more from the students than they learned from him.

So I often wondered whether there was a tension on the campus, especially along class and color lines. There was a small but growing black college-educated elite in those days, and they were likely to send their daughters to Spelman just like the other top HBCUs of the day, especially given that Morehouse was right across the street. But the black elite was still really small, and many of Spelman's students were first-generation college students from poor backgrounds.

Surely there had to be young black women who wanted and liked that "finishing school" aspect and clung to it, expecting to go the traditional route - marry a Morehouse man, become a wife and mother - and perhaps were upset with the students who were eroding that image in the public's mind. There were probably also the very radical students who were out there protesting and scoffed at the idea that they were at Spelman to be refined. The majority of students were probably caught in the middle somewhere, so I think a lot about the internal conflicts the young women were probably wrestling with at the time. What to do? Jeopardize your life and future (and perhaps even your student status) by getting involved or go with the flow and shut up?

It's funny because nowadays, Spelman really embraces the activist reputation of its students (even though in some ways it still has the rep of a refined ladies' college). It's part of the new ethos of the school. Our new unofficial motto is "a choice to change the world," after the name of a song that one of our alumna (who attended while I was there - I think she was in my class) penned about the college. (You can watch the Glee Club sing it on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxkiQCJBt9w. I can't not cry whenever I hear them perform it.)

I'm going to shut up now because I could talk about Spelman forever.

[girly123]

Ugh, it would be so fabulous. It makes me sad that it would never happen, but we can dream. :c

[poetic_pixie_13]

I admittedly don't know much about individual HBC's so I googled those three schools.

A movie about Spelman during the civil rights era would be so fantastic omg omg omg I would also do the camping out thing.

[girly123]

OMG YES IT SO WOULD BE ;A;

I had dreams of going to Spelman when I was a little girl, and for some stupid ass reason I wound up going to a shitty art school in the North instead.