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

[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.