“Politics, Not Policy, Trumps Police”: Nothing Gets Done On The Policy End Unless There Are Serious Changes In The Political Climate
As a 10-member delegation of Congressional Black Caucus members head to Ferguson on Sunday for a moment of Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday observance with its citizens, there’s been an emerging argument that now is the time for this second coming of the Civil Rights Movement to transition from its current protest phase to a much more mature public policy phase. As we speak, black elected officials on the state, federal and local level are engaged in a mad dash to draft bills addressing a number of issues related to police violence and misconduct.
There’s a big snag, though: nothing gets done on the policy end unless there are serious changes in the political climate. Without any dramatic alterations on the political landscape, don’t expect any radical implementation of public policy, much less full passage of it. Many observers, and even caucus members themselves, describe the flurry of police brutality, law enforcement data and criminal justice reform bills as “dead on arrival” in the very conservative House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA).
Republicans have shown no real public interest in addressing these issues, although CBC members claim that they will be getting hearings – at least – on the various bills introduced. But an emboldened Republican majority is running things in Congress and a very red political map of Republican governors and supermajorities in state capitols will keep that going.
The problem is that protesters are failing to make a very important distinction between Politics and Policy. These are two separate functions. They’re like cousins: they are definitely related, and yes, they support or, sometimes, fight each other. But the long-held perception that they’re identical twins is flat out wrong.
Ultimately, cousin policy can’t be implemented unless cousin politics is in the mix as bodyguard and hit man. Even when legislation becomes law, there’s no incentive for folks to follow it without political leverage in place to enforce it. President Obama may have signed the Death in Custody Reporting Act as an important nod to protesters, but it’s not like they’re whipping out the Grey Goose – many movement organizers don’t even know that happened.
And once it’s in place, there’s the question of funding and making sure there’s adequate political influence in cities and states to ensure police departments will be compliant.
Jim Crow didn’t suddenly crumble the day the Civil Rights Act was signed. Acceptance, albeit still slow, didn’t happen until black voters were mobilized into a solid political force to be reckoned with. Soon, we were electing black mayors, black city council members, and black state and federal legislators at a frantic pace. Eventually we got a black president. Since 1970, the number of black elected officials combined on the state, federal and local level has risen by about 650 percent (sadly, the folks who faithfully tallied that number over the past 44 years just went out of business last year – and no one seems to care).
We can quibble later over whether that’s translated into full equality for African Americans. But, you can’t argue with one clear fact: we have way greater flexibility to engage fully in society than we’ve ever had before.
Don’t get me wrong: this new discussion about transitioning from protest to policy is a very, very encouraging development. All movements, at some point, have to mature and grasp the legislative process. Recent criticism showed patience wearing thin from both prominent figures watching the movement and those within it as #BlackLivesMatter activists suddenly found themselves losing public sentiment. A recent YouGov poll shows 44 percent of Americans believe protesters should shoulder some responsibility for the murder of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenijian Liu – along with 40 percent saying police should have more say over law enforcement than the elected officials who pass their budgets and oversee their activities.
Such polling data reveal the uncomfortable reality that protesters are losing the public narrative, which is usually the direct result of a failed political game.
It’s been nearly six months since Michael Brown was killed, police unleashed blue fury on Ferguson, Missouri and Officer Darren Wilson got a pass. To date, the same mayor and city council are in place, with no plans for a recall election in the foreseeable future. That is downright unacceptable.
No heads have rolled and no public firings of ranking officials or police chiefs have taken place in any of those cities where there are large black populations that can be groomed, prepped and mobilized into ferocious take-no-prisoners political machines. Police officers are turning their back on the Mayor of New York City and actively engaging in “work stoppages” – yet, where’s the black political counter-act to that? Progressives and others are always clowning or bashing the Tea Party and other conservative political groups. But current civil rights protesters could actually learn something from them: Tea Party influence may have declined a bit in the past year, but Republican politicians are still forced to shape policy to their liking or face the prospect of job loss in a primary. Stand Your Ground and voter suppression laws would not have passed if powerful interests like the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council hadn’t applied pressure on Republican state lawmakers.
Right now, that’s a missing piece in the movement. People want immediate change they can see, hear and touch. Passing bills through a complex legislative process few average citizens understand won’t make a bit of difference if political blood isn’t spilled first. Bills don’t give you control. Winning elections and running things do.
By: Charles Ellison, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 16, 2015
“On Johnson’s Watch, And He Did Nothing To Stop It”: ‘Selma’ Got It Right About Johnson, The FBI And King
The debate is sharp over whether the movie Selma got it right about Lyndon Johnson and his relationship with and to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A counter argument challenges the film’s depiction of Johnson as at best wary of King and his mass street action campaigns in Selma in 1965 and the South for the passage of a voting rights bill, and at worst outright hostile to King’s actions. This debate will likely rage for years to come. But even more worrisome, Selma strongly hints that Johnson aided and abetted if not an active plotter in the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s dirty, illegal and covert war against King.
Whether Johnson knew every gruesome detail of Hoover’s assault on King is not known. However, there are tell-tell clues that Johnson’s involvement with Hoover’s covert campaign went deep. The first tip was his executive order on New Year’s Day, 1964 which in effect assured Hoover his tenure as FBI Director for life.
He reaffirmed that in November 1964 in a meeting with his then Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. Katzenbach had pressed Johnson to rein Hoover’s wiretapping excesses in. Johnson made it clear that he would he not take action against Hoover. He considered him a much valued source for information. That information was the steady stream of illegal wiretaps on the sexual antics and personal activities of any and every one from entertainers to Johnson’s political foes. The biggest haul of tapes though was those that Hoover had stockpiled on King. At the same meeting, Katzenbach explicitly told Johnson that Hoover was trying to peddle the tapes on King’s private doings to cooperative journalists.
At a follow-up news conference, Johnson feigned indignation at both Hoover and King and pledged to damp down the friction between the two. Hoover took that as a tacit endorsement and green light to step up his by then virtually open assault on King. That campaign went beyond simply collecting salacious tapes on King. As Selma graphically showed, Hoover sent one of the tapes purporting to show King in an adulterous sexual liaison to his wife Coretta Scott King. The tape was recorded and sent to Southern Christian leadership Conference headquarters in late 1964 just about the time that Johnson again declared his support of Hoover.
Hoover’s brutal and systematic covert campaign against King had a two-fold aim. One was to discredit King as the nation’s paramount civil rights leader and to discredit the entire civil rights movement in the process.
Hoover, and other top FBI officials routinely spit out these choice expletives about King “Dangerous,” “evil,” and a “colossal fraud.” They didn’t stop at name calling. They talked ominously of “neutralizing” him as an effective leader. And even more ominously they sent him a poison pen letter flatly saying “King you are done” and suggesting he kill himself.
Hoover assigned Assistant FBI director William Sullivan the dirty job of getting the goods on King. Sullivan branded King as the “most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation.” In his book My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, Sullivan described the inner circle of men assigned to get King. The group was made up of special agents mainly drawn from the Washington and Atlanta FBI offices. Their job was to monitor all of King’s activities. Much of their dirty tactics are well-known. They deluged him with wiretaps, physical surveillance, poison-pen letters, threats, harassment, intimidation, and smear sexual leaks to the media, and even at the time of his murder, Hoover had more plans to intensify the spy campaign against King. Decades later, Sullivan still publicly defended the FBI’s war against him, and made no apology for it. The FBI patterned its spy and harassment campaign against King on the methods used by its counterintelligence division and internal security sections during the 1940s and ’50s. The arsenal of dirty tactics they used included unauthorized wiretaps, agent provocateurs, poison-pen letters, “black-bag jobs” (breaking and entering to obtain intelligence) and the compiling of secret dossiers.
In the 1960s, the FBI recruited thousands of “ghetto informants,” for their relentless campaign of harassment and intimidation against African American groups. The bureau even organized its targets into Orwellian categories agents gave such labels as “Rabble Rouser Index,” “Agitator Index” and “Security Index.”
By the time Johnson assumed the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Hoover’s obsession with and campaign against King was in high gear. And the few times, Hoover’s campaign of slander and vilification of King was hinted at publicly, Johnson would shrug it off and reaffirm either publicly and privately Hoover’s absolute invaluable importance to him. What Johnson knew or worse authorized Hoover to do to thwart King will never be fully known. But as Selma pointed out, Hoover’s gutter campaign against King happened on Johnson’s watch, and he did nothing to stop it.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Blog, The Huffington Post, January 5, 2015
“What Matters In Selma”: Critics Are Completely Missing The Point
Ava DuVernay’s Selma is likely a top contender for the Academy Award for Best Picture. With its focus on the power of activism to force political and moral change, the highly praised film has the right message for our present moment of racial unrest. But not everyone is happy with the way it approaches history, and in particular, how it portrays President Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson “is devoid of any palpable conviction on voting rights. Vainglorious and power hungry, he unleashes his zealous pit bull, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, on King, who is determined to march in protest from Selma to Montgomery despite LBJ’s warning that it will be ‘open season’ on the protesters,” writes Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum director Mark K. Updegrove in a column for Politico magazine. “This characterization,” he continues, “flies in the face of history.”
Even harsher is former Johnson staffer Joseph A. Califano Jr., who accuses DuVernay of taking “trumped-up license with a true story that didn’t need any embellishment to work as a big-screen historical drama.” “In fact,” writes Califano, “Selma was LBJ’s idea.”
That’s a huge exaggeration. Activists had been organizing in Selma, Alabama, for at least two years before Martin Luther King Jr. met with Johnson, and weeks prior to his meeting with the president, King and his allies had decided on Selma as the site for new action and protests. By the time Johnson suggested something similar to King, the plan was already in motion.
But more than that, that entire line of criticism is misplaced. Selma isn’t a documentary or even a dramatized history. It is a film based on historical accounts, and like all films of its genre, it has a loose relationship to actual history. In Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, the investigation to solve the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, is transformed into a story of FBI heroes, one that ignores the role of local activists in bringing the killers to justice and doesn’t touch the bureau’s famous antagonism—under J. Edgar Hoover—toward the civil rights movement.
Just as egregious is the narrative of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, which shows a relentless Central Intelligence Agency—personified in Jessica Chastain as Maya—whose methods, including torture, lead to Osama Bin Laden and the military raid that killed him. The factual problem, as detailed in December’s Senate Intelligence Committee report, is that torture didn’t lead to unique intelligence. As such, it’s not clear that it helped find Bin Laden. But Bigelow made a choice to say otherwise, and in the context of the film, it’s defensible. Zero Dark Thirty—to my eyes at least—is less about the particulars of finding Bin Laden and more about the costs of obsession. What happens when you’re willing to give up everything for a single goal? What will you sacrifice? In this reading, torture is the moment when we—through Maya—commit to darkness in pursuit of our ends.
This is all to say that it’s wrong to treat nonfiction films—even biopics—as documentaries. Instead, it’s better to look at deviations from established history or known facts as creative choices—license in pursuit of art. As viewers, we should be less concerned with fact-checking and more interested in understanding the choices. Why did the director opt for this view and not a different one? If she omits and distorts, why? What is she trying to communicate?
It’s with these questions in mind that we should approach Selma. But first, we should look at how DuVernay actually presents Johnson (played by Tom Wilkinson) and his relationship with King (played by David Oyelowo).
At worst, DuVernay depicts Johnson and King as wary allies. In the film, Johnson agrees with King on the need for a Voting Rights Act, but he wants him to wait—Johnson has a Great Society to build—and warns that he doesn’t have the votes to push another civil rights bill on the heels of the 1964 Act, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations. It’s not that King and Johnson are enemies—they both want to dismantle Jim Crow—as much as they have different responsibilities and priorities. In order to act, Johnson needs a push. And King gives it to him.
Now, there’s a case that even this is unfair to Johnson. While it’s true he didn’t want to introduce a voting rights bill so soon after the Civil Rights Act of 1964—he needed votes for his economic program, and he didn’t want to alienate Southern Democrats—it’s also true that, in late 1964, Johnson told Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to write the “the goddamndest, toughest voting rights act you can devise.” This draft was written with help from Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, and was the basis for the bill the leaders introduced in March 1965. The Johnson of Selma, in other words, is much more reluctant than the Johnson of reality.
This is most clear in the scenes with Hoover (played by Dylan Baker), where Johnson allows the FBI director to harass King’s family with evidence of his infidelity. This is a far cry from real life. Yes, Johnson knew the contents of the FBI’s file on King, but there’s no evidence he conspired to smear him. That was a Hoover project, with no connection to Selma or the Voting Rights Act. Johnson may have been frustrated, but he wasn’t stupid, and attacking King would have only radicalized the movement, pushing it closer to its more militant activists. As much as King needed Johnson, Johnson needed King.
Which brings us back to our original question, arguably the only one you should ask of a movie that fictionalizes historical events: Why did the director make these choices? What is DuVernay trying to tell us when she makes Johnson more reluctant than he was, or when she shifts the timeline to give him a role in the FBI’s smear tapes? It’s possible these choices reflect ignorance, but I don’t think that’s right—Selma gets so much right about the period that it’s hard to believe DuVernay just didn’t know. It’s also possible they reflect malice, but again, Johnson isn’t the villain of the film—that distinction goes to Tim Roth’s (delightful) George Wallace, who doesn’t care that he’s on the “wrong side of history.”
If you need a clue, look at the people portrayed in the movie. If you don’t count Martin Sheen, who plays federal Judge Frank Minis Johnson Jr., Johnson and Wallace are the only politicians. Almost everyone else is an activist or an ordinary citizen: Carmen Ejogo’s Coretta Scott King, Lorraine Toussaint’s Amelia Boynton, Wendell Pierce’s Hosea Williams, Keith Stanfield’s Jimmie Lee Jackson, Stephan James’ John Lewis, Jeremy Strong’s James Reeb, André Holland’s Andrew Young, and many, many others.
Selma, simply put, is about the men and women who fought to put voting rights on the national agenda, and it engages history from their perspective. By hardening Johnson—and making him a larger roadblock than he was—DuVernay emphasizes the grass roots of the movement and the particular struggles of King and his allies. In the long argument of who matters most—activists or politicians—DuVernay falls on the side of the former, showing how citizens can expand the realm of the possible and give politicians the push—and the room—they need to act.
By those terms, Selma mostly succeeds. But there are flaws. “Except for a few scenes, we see little of the bravery Selma’s citizens displayed,” writes historian Gary May for the Daily Beast. “Annie Lee Cooper, well played by [Oprah] Winfrey, is shown trying but failing to register to vote. We are not told that Cooper had been able to vote without hindrance when she lived in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. But when she returned to Selma in 1962 to care for her aged mother, she lost that right.”
If Selma could have been better, it wasn’t because DuVernay didn’t do justice to Lyndon Johnson, but because there was so much to show about the ordinary people of Selma, and we—as viewers—don’t see it.
By: Jamelle Bouie, Slate, January 2, 2014
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