I watched the movie Selma for my movie review. I had never watched the movie before and had wanting to watch it for some time now. The movie was very sad but now after watching it I feel encouraged to fight for my rights and others. The movie Selma is the heart-breaking truth about how the African Americans fought for their freedom in the 1960’s. Martin Luther King Jr. was known for being a minister in Atlanta and a rights activist for African American freedoms. The movie is about King trying to get President Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Acts and the marches he led in the process.
The movie starts out with King receiving the Nobel Prize in Sweden with his wife Coretta. When King returns he goes to the White House and urges President Johnson to give African Americans the right to vote, Johnson tells him that he has other things to do and King will have to wait. King does not like what he hears so he travels to Selma, Alabama and decides it is the perfect place to start his peaceful protest because of the Alabama state troopers who enforce the discrimination. After King decides Selma is the right place, he contacts SSCLC (Selma’s Southern Christian
Leadership Conference) to get their help and reinforcement. Once the SSCLC say they will help King and his team first that a march will be the most effective way to show America how the African Americans are treated unequally. On March 7, 1965 they decide to march, today it is referred to as Bloody Sunday because the peaceful protestors were inhumanly beaten by Alabama troopers of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. After this, Martin Luther King Jr. called anyone who would come and and join them in their protest.
Many came to join, even whites. They marched and were granted access to pass but King though it ay be a trap so he turned around and went back, many were upset by this and blamed King for ruining their chance to finally march. When the activist were finally given a court day, the judge gave them 5 days to march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama. While they were marching many joined along the way and many gave the marchers food and water, When the march was over, President Johnson gave them what they wanted, the right to vote.
The movie Selma is closely related to Chapter 8: Race and Ethnicity. The African Americans are a minority group so that makes them subject to more racial iscrimination. Discrimination is an act of unfair treatment directed against an individual or group. Discriminations happens everywhere every day, for some it’s a part of their everyday lives and it shouldn’t be. Discrimination can happen for any reason and it doesn’t always have to be racial, it could be anything from who you voted for president to or people making fun of you clothes.
The type of discrimination in Selma is individual discrimination this means person-to-person or face-to-face discrimination; the negative treatment of people by other individuals. Prejudice was also another key factor in Selma, Prejudice is basically when a person or group thinks that they are better than some else and acts in a negative way towards that certain person or group. The Selma Head Sheriff Jim Clack was probably one of the main reasons for all this prejudice, he didn’t think the African Americans should have the right to vote and he influenced others in Selma to think the same.
Like discrimination prejudice doesn’t always include race prejudice could be your family is poor and you see these rich families and say rude comments to them and treat them poorly or vice versa, ou come from a wealthy family and you think the poor are beneath you so you treat like servants, even though they are just as much human as you are. Like I said before, African Americans are the minority group and the whites are the majority group so many saw white people during the 60’s as the dominant group over the minorities.
A minority group is a group of people who are singled out for unequal treatment and who regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination. A dominant group is the group with the most power, greatest privileges, and the highest social status. Since segregation had ust ended in the 1960’s there was lots of white dominance, this meaning most or some whites thought the African Americans were still beneath them. Since this was their mentality the whites treated blacks like they did not matter and in a way dehumanized them, which is not okay.
What Martin Luther King Jr. nd his followers strived for was to history forever, and that’s what they did King wanted equality and to some extent that’s exactly what he got. I wish that I could say we are equal today and even though we technically are some still have the mentality that they are dominant over he minorities, which they are not. Chapter 7: Social Stratification, social stratification is the division of large numbers into layers according to their relative property, power, and prestige and it applies to both nations and to people within a nation, society or other group.
The African Americans had very low power and prestige this caused them to have less say and why they had to march to get their freedoms. While most think that race was the reason for slavery in most cases it isn’t. But in our case I really do think that slavery was just a race ssue and whites thought that because African Americans had darker skin that they were lesser than them. I know that Selma isn’t about slavery but it is the same concept of, they have darker skin than us so must treat them differently.
This also ties in with social class, the three common social classes are upper, middle, and lower. Since whites always saw African Americans as being part of the lower class, the African Americans were always low priority to people like President Johnson and other officials, this wasn’t fair and was very unjust. Even if someone is n a lower class that doesn’t mean that they should be any less priority, equality should always be the first priority.
A caste system is a form of social stratification in which people’s nge the course of Selma also relates to statuses are determined by birth and are lifelong. Now I know there wasn’t a legitimate caste system but in some way there was. What I mean by this is when an African American person was born they were automatically at the bottom of this invisible caste system. Whites were treated with more respect and had rights the black man did not have.
No one really talked about his invisible caste system but it was definitely there, and while the African Americans weren’t slaves anymore they were still treated horribly. But I do think that when Martin Luther King Jr. fought for their freedoms that the caste system disappeared a little. Some may say that this invisible caste system is still here today but I don’t think so, sure there may be some oppression but it certainly isn’t as bad as it was in the 60’s, if we could completely get rid of all of the oppression and hatred between both races I think that we would be in such great shape as a country.
