The justification of the movie’s fictitious revision of LBJ’s actions is presumably driven by an important need, as the author says. That need is to neutralize the long standing tendency in Hollywood to run away with all stories about the struggles of African-American protagonists and insert a white character as the savior and central figure. The movie’s director clearly tried to resist this impulse to belittle African-American stories and view them merely as a byproduct of some random white person’s noble actions.
If she had done so by writing out or diminishing some random, minor white character’s role in ‘Selma’, in order to make sure that that character did not take over the story of the civil right movement and Dr. King, it would be understandable, and forgivable as artistic license.
Unfortunately, Lyndon Baines Johnson was no minor white character in the story of the Voting Rights Act. He was the President of the United States. And he was, unavoidably, both a prime mover in the creation and passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights act, and white.
For the film’s director to ignore this rather large historical fact and narrative complication in the interest of defending the “black” narrative, is at best cynical, and at worst, dishonest.
LBJ was Texan, larger than life, casually racist and in the mid-sixties, the most important friend of the Civil Rights Movement in white America. A friend who was President of the country, no less.
The story of the Civil Rights movement rightly belongs to Dr. King and African Americans. But it is impossible to tell it honestly by writing out LBJ or by making him a bad guy.
The movie’s director and this article’s reasoning only provides ammunition to racists who will now claim that all African-Americans, the moment it suits their purpose, will slander any supporters or friends who are white.