Word: selma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When I arrived in Alabama, however, I was surprised. It looked just like the real world. Montgomery and Birmingham could have been in any other state; and even the legendary Selma looked like any Midwest commercial town. There were no border guards to weed out Northerners who had come to meddle; thick-necked police didn't roam the strets with electric cattle prods; Negroes walked on the sidewalks and not in the gutters. There were more Wallace posters, of course, and the bookstands seemed notably short of books like Black Power. But if Alabama wasn't Cambridge or Haight-Ashbury...
...over two hours the film--which was shot in Selma, Alabama--winds its desultory course. When the camera leaves Arkin, it doesn't seem to know who to follow next. The scenes are logical, but ill-timed. You get the feeling the camera arrives on the set at just the wrong moment. All sense of time is lost. It is the acting of Arkin and Locke which finally manages, against all odds, to establish some sort of mood...
...More? News coverage is severely damaged by Tarver's refusal to establish bureaus or send reporters to cover stories outside Atlanta. The paper, for example, did not even send its own man to cover the 1965 disturbances at Selma, Ala. The Journal and the Constitution are each allowed only one correspondent in Washington, and the correspondent's activity is largely restricted to reporting the utterances of Georgia's Senators and Congressmen. Patterson and other editors have argued for more money for their staffs and more coverage of the news, but their efforts have met with little success...
...hunger continues. There have been sporadic efforts to solve it--the most recent by the Southern Rural Research Project (SRRP). SRRP workers, working from their headquarters in the black section of Selma, Ala., spent the summer of 1967 making a quantitative survey of just how many people were hungry, why they were hungry, and what could be done about it. Their work led to the production of several reports and to the CBS television special 'Hunger In America...
Unfortunately, Southern police have goten shrewder since the old days of marches in Selma and Birmingham. Police chiefs have learned that brutality, arrests, tear gas and fire hoses offer at best a temporary solution, because there is no way for the Old South to hold out against the Northern press and its hated film clips of marchers being gassed. The police knew that they could beat SRRP by leaving it alone; SRRP was beaten. The 20,000 pounds didn't last long, and without national press coverage, SRRP returned to its old local tactics...