Word: selma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...signs of doing better. The stories of Anthony, 19, Kemya, 16, and Myndell, the baby, 14, all have a disturbing sameness. None of them are interested in school; all are drawn to the street. They don't read % newspapers or much of anything else. When asked what places like Selma, Birmingham and Greensboro mean to them, they are dumbfounded...
...state troopers of Alabama have turned up at several points in the history of the civil rights movement, usually on the opposing side. In 1963 Governor George Wallace called them out to block school integration in Tuskegee. Two years later they were pummeling black demonstrators on the Selma-to-Montgomery freedom march. So it was less than surprising that when the time came to integrate themselves, they dragged their feet. The force totally excluded blacks as troopers until ordered to hire them in 1972 by a federal court. Then it dawdled in the face of subsequent court orders to promote...
Their hair was grayer, their faces more lined, but here they all came, marching proudly out of history and onto the newest battlefield of racial conflict. Coretta King, Hosea Williams, Joseph Lowery, Andrew Young -- some of them had demonstrated with Martin Luther King in Montgomery, and some in Selma, and some in Washington, and now they had gathered with more than 20,000 supporters to march through Cumming, in Forsyth County, Ga., to protest the immutable racism there and the resurgence of racism elsewhere. And though King had been shot down 19 years ago, this was the week for observing...
Eyes on the Prize is indispensable not just for its lucid treatment of the milestones of the era but for its keen eye on less noted events. A tense encounter between a band of demonstrators and a deputy sheriff on the streets of Selma, for example, turns into an impromptu "debate" between people from different planets: "Do you believe in equal justice?" "I don't believe in equal nothin'!" The narration by Julian Bond is admirably restrained, and - those interviewed (from such movement leaders as John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael to old foes like Alabama Sheriff Jim Clark) look back...
Like World War II, the civil rights struggle of those years has acquired an aura of almost romantic purity. The goals were clear-cut and indisputable, the heroes and villains easy to discern, the achievements tangible and lasting. As the documentary points out, Selma was not just a culmination but the end of an era. Soon to come were the big-city race riots, a more militant strain of student protest and a breakup of the coalition that had driven the campaign for racial equality. Eyes on the Prize recalls the days when the sheer rightness of the cause...