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The movie-made Movement: civil rites of passage Sharon Monteith

Memory believes before knowing remembers. (William Faulkner)

Forgetting is just another kind of remembering. (Robert Penn Warren)

Film history cannibalises images, expropriates themes and tech- niques, and decants them into the contents of our collective memory. Movie memories are influenced by the (inter)textuality of media styles – Fredric Jameson has gone so far as to argue that such styles displace ‘real’ history. The Civil Rights Movement made real history but the Movement struggle was also a media event, played out as a teledrama in homes across the world in the 1950s and 1960s, and it is being replayed as a cinematic event. The interrela- tionship of popular memory and cinematic representations finds a telling case study in the civil rights era in the American South. This chapter assesses what films made after the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s express about the failure of the Movement to sus- tain and be sustained in its challenges to inequality and racist injus- tice. It argues that popular cultural currency relies on invoking images present in the sedimented layers of civil rights preoccupa- tions but that in the 1980s and 1990s movies also tap into ‘struc- tures of feeling’. Historical verisimilitude is bent to include what Tom Hayden called in 1962 ‘a reassertion of the personal’ as part of the political, but it is also bent to re-present the Movement as a communal struggle in which ordinary southern white people are much more significant actors in the personal and even the public space of civil rights politics than was actually the case. Historical facts as we retrieve and interpret them are only one facet of the movie-made Movement.

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In a reception-driven analysis, film genres and sub-genres do not exist until they become necessary. It would be impossible to argue that something called ‘civil rights cinema’ existed before the end of the 1980s, by which time a provisional sub-genre of feature films had begun to develop around race and rights with reference out to the Movement. In the 1960s films that examined civil rights strug- gles in any guise at all were usually reviewed as ‘small town movies’ or ‘southern melodrama’ or ‘social problem pictures’. Over the last two decades of the twentieth century, there has developed a criti- cally self-conscious body of work on commemoration and retrieval and it is during this period that, as Richard Rorty has observed, ‘the novel, the movie and the TV program . . . gradually but steadily replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress’.1 Before this, movies with plots incor- porating civil rights struggles could turn up in any popular genre from westerns to courtroom dramas, and even comedies.

Slowly a small but distinct body of films is developing in which Movement successes are celebrated and strategies and losses inter- rogated – Freedom Song (2000), Boycott (2001) and The Rosa Parks Story (2002), for example. But these films, like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) and A Huey P. Newton Story (2001), fall outside of the broad (predominantly white) mainstream cinematic tradition. More usually, black activists (CORE and SNCC) and protagonists (Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr.) have been caught in an epistemological drift, their stories dispersed and scattered through narratives in which white protagonists undergo a rites of passage or racial conversion. Most white directors and screenwriters espouse a liberal reformist vision in working out private salvations. But as Martin Luther King Jr. opined in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), liberalism can be ‘all too sentimen- tal concerning human nature’, leaning towards a ‘false idealism’. Films made in our own historical moment tend to ensure that civil rights cinema becomes a cinema of integration and reconcilia- tion. They function in a postmodern imaginary as socially symbolic texts in which racial tensions that remain unresolved in life find temporary resolution in narrative space. To do this, they focus on relationships between individuals, reducing larger historical events to personal histories, domesticating public memory of the Civil Rights Movement.

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Memory and catechism

Shared cultural events are always ‘historical’, as George Lipsitz has argued in Time Passages (1990), discussing the ways in which tele- vision in the 1950s naturalised the nuclear family as a touchstone of modern American society. Collective memory functions to co- ordinate and to fabricate national identity and unity. Movie memories circulate among producers, directors, and audiences; an archival memory-store of civil rights iconography, or an ‘arcade’ of motifs, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s terminology, finds space in the popular cul- tural imaginary that is contemporary cinema. Memories tied to place as well as period can provide momentum in and of themselves. Car- olyn Goodman, Andrew’s mother, drove the road from Meridian in 1989, alone in the Mississippi night, still trying to come to terms with what happened to her civil rights worker son, twenty-five years after his brutal murder in 1964. In 1991 the gravestone of James Chaney, the black activist murdered along with Goodman and Schwerner, was defaced: a bullet fired into the photograph of the deceased. As I write, the Mississippi Freedom Summer murder case may be reopened so that those defendants acquitted by a hung (white) jury in 1967 may be re-investigated. The history of the Civil Rights Movement is so recent that dramatic personal re-enactments, historic cases of justice deferred, and public commemorations proliferate.

In 2000, President Clinton, Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and civil rights leaders retraced the Selma to Montgomery March that turned into ‘Bloody Sunday’ in 1965. They marked the 35th anniversary on Edmund Pettus Bridge, itself a solid signifier of the Movement past in popular memory. Commemora- tions reinforce the significance of the Movement as mythology and as catechism, as well as history. Heritage tourism is the fastest grow- ing feature of the leisure market according to Angela DaSilva, who founded the National Black Tourism Network in 1996: ‘Everyone wants to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge . . . And everyone wants to do it singing “We Shall Overcome” at the top of their lungs’.2 In fact, a number of TV shows have picked up on this fasci- nation from Quantum Leap to I’ll Fly Away. Most recently in an episode called ‘Revisionism’, The Education of Max Bickford (CBS February 2002) included an African American professor who mis- represented herself as a Freedom Rider. College principal (Regina Taylor) admonishes her, ‘People died. You can’t take ownership of

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that. It disrespects their memory’, and in 1999 in an episode of Touched By An Angel (CBS April 1999) called ‘Black Like Monica’, Rosa Parks played herself as ‘mother of the Civil Rights Movement’ and honoured speaker when a small town in Illinois celebrates dis- covering a stop on the Underground Railroad. Popular memory fuses the pedagogical with the affective. It prefers to mythologise Rosa Parks as a tired seamstress rather than a trained activist and sec- retary of the Montgomery chapter of National Association of Col- ored People (NAACP). Those like Irene Morgan and Claudette Colvin, who took a stand on segregated public transportation and who refused to relinquish their seats to whites before Parks, have fallen out of history and are only just beginning to receive critical attention. The intervening years would seem to allow more creative space in which to interpret the past in order to deepen historical con- sciousness and yet movies often eschew hermeneutical struggles with form and changing definitions of heroism, tending to follow realis- tic conventions in ‘authenticating’ rather than re-visioning the Civil Rights Movement. Critical realism is not inevitably the most effec- tive way of representing recent history in ways that continue to touch the popular imagination though, as television has shown. However, many working in history and cinema still betray in their work on film a reductive focus on fidelity – even historians David Herlihy and Natalie Zemon Davis, who have each acted as consul- tants for movies. Herlihy displays a keen awareness of the ‘gaps, ambiguities and prejudices’ in historical resources but he fails to see how films can ‘carry’ the same critical apparatus as historical texts – when they display the same aporia, they are dismissed as erroneous rather than historiography. Disciplinary essentialism of this kind fails to recognise movies as culturally conditioned productions embedded in the fabric of film history, or that the struggle with their accuracy can never be entirely separated from their ‘ritual function’.3 History has less epistemological hold on movies than memory.

Alice Walker’s first published essay in the American Scholar in 1967 was an assessment of the Civil Rights Movement subtitled ‘What Good Was It?’, in which she described the Movement as ‘a call to life’ for people like herself who did not exist ‘either in books or in films or in the government of their own lives’.4 Much was invested in a defining social movement in the 1960s but just a gen- eration later the Movement seems to find its continued meaning in images (Martin Luther King at the March on Washington; dogs and

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water cannons turned on black children in Birmingham; Autherine Lucy or Elizabeth Eckford braving rabid white racists alone to enrol in school; George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door). Walter Benjamin has warned that ideas can evaporate in images because ‘every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’, and Fredric Jameson’s critique of recycled clichés includes the recognition that time is fragmented into ‘a series of perpetual presents’.5

An obvious problem for filmmakers is ‘receding concreteness’, to borrow Adorno’s phrasing. In (re)connecting with a disappearing history, civil rights film narratives are typically recursive, but what they actually suffer from is ‘presentism’, whereby the pressures of the present distort our understanding of the past.6 Character-led dramas (often based on autobiographical novels, and memoir – like Crisis at Central High, Heart of Dixie, and Passion for Justice: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story) promote a single monologic point of view to create what has ubiquitously come to be known as a ‘useable past’, in which resolution and reconciliation are valued over the propensity to grasp what might have been important to black and white southerners in the civil rights era. The priority becomes what is important to producers and audiences at the moment of the film’s production; directors and screenwriters shape the tale into what James Snead calls ‘replacement history’. For example, Crisis at Cen- tral High (1981) never mentions the role of Daisy Bates, head of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP and the leading organiser during the Little Rock crisis of 1957–58. Rather, a ‘Mrs Richardson’ fulfils her role in two short scenes. Sensitive to public agendas that include the redemption of whiteness and white liberals, the movie is based on teacher Elizabeth P. Huckaby’s journals in which a conservative moderate transforms into a spokeswoman for integration and takes a stand. This is an important story but since the Little Rock Nine are named and represented (though oddly Elizabeth Eckford is also renamed), one wonders what purpose there is in eliding the name of one of the most respected civil rights leaders in order to tell it. To foreground whiteness is often to withhold blackness; partial stories masquerade as objective understatement, or ‘simply what happened’ when framed by supposedly unemotional, fair-minded white pro- fessionals – like Huckaby, newspaper publisher Hazel Brannon Smith, and the student based on novelist Ann Rivers Siddons in Heart of Dixie.7

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Synoptic cinema: the public/private distinction

Civil rights cinema does not sit comfortably within theories of genri- fication. For Rick Altman, genrification always operates dialectically, transforming an existing set of films until they are ‘mashed, twisted and reshaped into unrecognizably new forms’.8 Recent films share few semantic or syntactic elements with movies made in the 1960s. Nor are they ‘new’. Instead they vault back, sidestepping brave little films like The Intruder (1961) and Nothing But A Man (1964), to reshape liberal social conscience movies like Pinky (1949), Intruder in the Dust (1949) and Lost Boundaries (1949), Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), that are not ‘about’ the Movement at all. As Ralph Ellison opines, these films are ‘not about Negroes at all; they are about what whites think and feel about Negroes’.9 The tendency is to retell the movement as individual morality tales for a nation in which black and white individuals remain disconcertingly separate. While James Snead has argued that film ‘translates the personal into the communal so quickly that eleva- tion of the dominant and the degradation of the subordinate are simultaneous and corporate’, civil rights cinema operates conversely in translating the communal into the personal.10 It is easy to deplore the retreat into the personal as a current ‘fetish’ of mass-market cul- ture. Adrienne Rich, for example, cites TV talk show culture from which the viewer ‘might deduce that all human interactions are lim- ited to individual predicaments . . . personal confessions and revela- tions’.11 Civil rights feature films of the 1980s and 1990s functioned as the kind of performed naivety Rich describes.

Of the many films one could use for exemplification – from Crisis at Central High to Love Field – The Long Walk Home (1994) is per- haps the clearest in that it domesticates a landmark civil rights strug- gle, the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56. It re-constructs the boycott along a trajectory of the lives of two women during the first weeks of the protest, a black domestic worker, Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg), and her white middle-class employer, Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek). The full significance of the boycott as a demonstration of collective black solidarity remains secondary to the primary focus on the women’s relationship, and in particular on the white woman.12 The development of Miriam’s character from a smil- ing housewife and upholder of the racial status quo (‘The rest of the world around you is living that way so you just don’t question it’) to

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a tearful and determined participant in the movement for desegre- gation provides the narrative impetus of a film. Odessa is carved out as the film’s moral heroine but not its primary subject. If one takes the subject as the character most affected by the ideological con- struction of the film text, Miriam clearly fulfills that role because the film works as a ‘racial conversion narrative’ in Fred Hobson’s analy- sis of the memoirs of white southerners who grow up racist but ‘see the light’. Novelist Reynolds Price, for example, allows ‘Now when I see films of the flocking brave faces, black and white, of the early civil rights movement . . . I’m more than sorry that my face is miss- ing’.13 In the 1980s and 1990s Hollywood inserted the missing faces into the civil rights story. White moderates, specifically those whose silence had overwhelmed their hatred for cruelty (Price admits, ‘All these years later . . . my silence offends me’) are delivered up in movies that are really about a desire for forgiveness and regret for the loss of hope in interracial coalitions.

In The Long Walk Home, hope for an enduring reconciliation across racial, economic and class divisions is a considerable weight for a single relationship to carry. Writer John Cork and director Richard Pearce are not uncritical of the paradigmatic formulation of mistress and maid; they deploy it to interrogate the fabric of segregation and as a structural device to investigate the ways in which black women were typically sutured into the lives of white women. However, in foregrounding Miriam, the black struggle is superseded by a narrative deemed to meet the affective needs of a white audience. Miriam’s position, morally satisfying as it is, remains tenuous and untypical. Historically, there were many more women like those who play cards at the bridge club and remain broadly antagonistic to reforms than women like Montgomery’s Virginia Durr, or Juliette Morgan, whose letter to the Advertiser expressed support and deep respect for the black protesters. Morgan was so hounded by angry whites that she finally committed suicide. Cork and Pearce just manage to steer clear of a utopian happy ending to a black and a white woman’s precarious alliance. But, the dominant story remains the white woman’s racial conversion in the face of her husband’s disapproval.

To read the film historiographically is to recognise a series of signifiers of the boycott. A white Montgomerian, Cork painstak- ingly, if somewhat lyrically, re-presents the atmosphere of a city engaged in a ‘war of wills in the cradle of the Confederacy’, as he casts the conflict between the protesters and their opponents. As

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factory employees, including Odessa’s husband, gather to read the flyer urging them to boycott the buses on 5 December 1955, the incident of Claudette Colvin refusing to relinquish her seat to a white person is referred to as ‘the Colberg case’, repeating the mis- take in the original boycott notices and exemplifying the film’s bid for authenticity at the level of detail. The mayor, W. A. Gayle, and Grover Hall, editor of the Advertiser, are referred to directly and Miriam is seen reading the Advertiser on the first morning of the protest with its headline ‘Extra Police Set For Patrol Work in Trolley Boycott’. Mass meetings at Holt Street Baptist Church are recreated and although Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is typically concealed in a series of cutaway shots, the first speech he delivered as head of the Montgomery Improvement Association rings out for the con- gregation (‘If we are wrong . . . then the Supreme Court is wrong . . . And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream’). Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers is represented, as is his attendance at the White Citizens Council rally of early January 1956 at which he expressed his support for the Council in general and for its battle against the desegregation of public transport in particular. The reaction of black Montgomerians to the bombing of King’s home is portrayed, as are Commissioner Sellers’ comments at the time. The city of Montgomery itself is textualized in director Richard Pearce’s patterning of empty yellow City Lines buses threading their way to Washington Park and Capitol Heights. The inclement weather of December/January 1955–56 is specifically rep- resented, as Odessa braves the wind and rain to make her way across town to work.

Pearce worked for many years as a documentary cameraman (Woodstock and Hearts and Minds) and at the formal level, The Long Walk Home is naturalistic, the camerawork intended to reveal the historical Montgomery of the 1950s as the small southern town impacts our popular memory. The credits move into a monochrome establishing shot of the town that slips into colour as dawn breaks on another Montgomery morning. The camera sweeps the skyline before swooping down to reveal black domestic workers paying their fare at the front of a bus before dismounting to re-enter at the back, as required under Jim Crow. This archetypal sequence, shots of black people walking to and from work at dawn and dusk, and lining the pavement outside the King house after it is bombed, act as

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‘image facts’, units of impression assembled to coalesce in the drive for historical verisimilitude.14 And, I would add, as talismanic motifs of what the Movement struggled to change framed as images in our popular memory.

Clayborne Carson has described the iconography of the Civil Rights Movement as confrontations of good versus evil, and Pearce assembles scenes to locate this feature of the Montgomery struggle; white intransigence, often very vocal and translated into brute force, is opposed by black moral certainty and courageous calm. A prag- matic desire to maintain the domestic status quo that enables her own lifestyle, combined with something close to an altruistic con- cern for the difficulties her employee encounters in getting across town, propels Miriam to support her domestic of ten years standing when she upholds the boycott. Many white women ignored Mayor Gayle’s demand that they desist from driving their domestics to work. They famously retorted that since he was unprepared to undertake domestic work in their homes himself, they would con- tinue to support those who were. Self-interest and southern tradi- tion were powerful forces which led to white women incidentally and inadvertently aiding the boycott. It is from this position that Miriam shows her support of Odessa. But, a change ensues that spurs Miriam into supporting the boycott itself, beyond the effica- cies of her own self-interestedness. This change derives as much, if not more, from her shock and shame at her husband’s reactionary behaviour in aligning himself with his bigoted brother and the White Citizens’ Council, than it does from her developing appreciation of Odessa.

No matter how carefully the boycott has been visually established, it is finally Norman Thompson (Dwight Schultz) who pushes his wife from private sympathy to a public display of support. He is ‘a good husband and a good provider’ turned bad in the classic iconog- raphy of civil rights movies. On Christmas Eve he is held in the frame, hugging his two daughters, as they are backlit in such a way that a halo of light arcs around the trio as Miriam looks on with a smile. But he is caught up in the recalcitrance of his peers; his man- hood challenged by his younger brother. Besieged, Norman follows the morally reprehensible path in a film that is carefully coded around ethical decision-making; unlike Odessa’s daughter, who rides the bus because she places her own desires before the needs of the community for a brief aberrant moment, he does not learn from

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his mistakes. The final shots of Norman are of his helplessness in the face of white violence against his wife. He gazes hopelessly at Miriam as she and their young daughter join the boycotters, and in so doing step outside his jurisdiction.

Despite the sentimental claims of the reviewer for Jet who believes that ‘Suddenly a bond is created and the women finally begin to learn about each other, finding out about each other’s strength and inner beauty’, Odessa continues to refer to her employer as ‘Miss Thompson’ throughout the film.15 Odessa’s char- acter does not change over the course of the narrative. She is self- possessed throughout; progressively more tired but never defeated. She is a paradigm of the ennobled, resolute black citizen who has the decorum and poise that Jo Ann Robinson attributed to Rosa Parks, as signalled in the title of Parks’ memoir, Quiet Strength (1994). In the opening sequence she stands on the bus on her way to work. Her face composed. She is alone. The final freeze-frame is of her face in close-up as she holds her place in the line of passive resistance the black women have formed against the white men who seek to destroy the carpool and humiliate the women who use it. The camera moves laterally as she and Miriam exchange tearful, apprehensive smiles but it is on Odessa’s face – a picture of dignity – that it rests. Her face is the closing image of the film. Odessa is Cork’s tribute to those June Jordan has described as the ‘invisible women’ of the civil rights epoch. The narrator makes this clear: ‘50,000 boycotted the buses in Montgomery. I knew one. Her name was Odessa Cotter’.16

The emphasis shifts towards the white family as soon as it is swiftly understood that the black family will endure. The vicissi- tudes within the white household become the main subject matter of a white family melodrama located within the context of the boycott. When Miriam first expresses her intention to drive for the carpool, Odessa reminds her of the consequences she will inevitably face: ‘Once you step over there, I don’t know if you can ever step back.’ My reading, therefore, militates against the promotional publicity for the movie that declares, ‘Their forbidden friendship changed a nation’. Despite around ten years of daily contact, there is no evi- dence in the film of any intimate exchange between the women before the boycott triggers communication. As a direct result of the boycott, however, Norman Thompson’s racist fears of change in the South are made manifest and his college-educated wife is forced

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either to align herself with his bigotry, ignore it (and Virginia Durr amongst others have repeatedly argued that the Southern lady was often expected to meet a situation by simply acting as if it hadn’t happened),17 or oppose it. That she chooses the latter course is, of course, the salient focus of the film. Miriam is one of Betty Friedan’s suburban housewives for whom ‘the problem with no name’ begins to come into focus as a need to be useful in a community in which her symbolic status as a southern lady can operate to deny her auton- omy. The film is actually Miriam’s story about wresting back her autonomy; civil rights history is reshaped into a (white) feminist coming-of-age story.

Mississippi burning and squirming

The recycling and consumption of the past as nostalgia fortifies pop- ular cultural representations of the civil rights era as an integra- tionist success story in which the racist past is ‘overcome’ with the help of well-meaning whites. But the effect of such films can be much more complicated and far-reaching than first appears. Alan Parker purposefully rewrites history when he decides that the FBI bribing a Klansman to give up details of the Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner murders (Delmar Dennis was paid $30,000) does not fit the ideological project that is Mississippi Burning (1988). He tells a different story in which the FBI roots out the corrupt police and Ku Klux Klan members who conspired to kill the civil rights workers. They succeed with a little help from locals with a conscience, a hint of romantic love, a lot of trickery, and some swaggering aggression. When the film is raked over by former activists, historians, journal- ists, a newly-revived Klan, and the Sheriff in the 1964 murder case, it becomes the stuff of public debate and Parker’s rescripting of events enters popular memory.

In Parker’s version of events, FBI agents Ward, a northerner, Harvard-graduate and serious stickler for playing by the rules (Willem Dafoe), and Anderson, a former Sheriff and volatile, if reconstructed, southern redneck willing to break the rules (Gene Hackman), arrive in fictional Jessup County, Mississippi to investi- gate the disappearance of three civil rights workers, two white and one black. Basing the story on history, they discover their bodies in an earthen dam forty-four days after they were reported missing. In the interim, violence ensues at every turn as the FBI cuts through the

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customs of a small town’s strained race relations; the two main protagonists learn to respect each other; and Anderson’s chivalry towards a law officer’s wife leads to information as to where the dead are buried.

Mississippi Burning was the first Hollywood blockbuster to focus on the Movement. What actually happened in 1964 (and a

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