History & the Movies: Selma

March 2025 update: Check out this article that talks about the Eyes on the Prize episode of Selma. In it I found this link to John Lewis's reaction to the film (written back in 2015). 

Also, if you are looking for more Civil Rights resources, see my post, ""The Top 8 Mistakes Teachers When Teaching the Modern Civil Rights Era."

Jan 2024 update: check out this "looking back" on the film Selma article from The Root.

June 2020 update: See this guide to films/documentaries to use when teaching about Civil Rights by the Hasan Kwame Jeffries, history professor at Ohio State University.

March 6 update: Hooray! One of my favorite podcasts recently took on this issue. Check out BackStory with the American History Guys recent episode about history & the movies.

Jan 17 update: In response to one of my tweets, I was alerted to this helpful resource from
teachingforchange.org, "The Selma Voting Rights Struggle: 15 Points from Bottom-Up History and Why It Matters Today." Thank you to the ZinnEdProject.org for alerting me to it. Also, check out "Ten Things You Should Know about Selma before You See the Film" from CommonDreams.org.

And here is the link to read the transcript of the telephone conversation between LBJ and MLK on January 15, 1965. This is the key area in which the film's interpretation differs significantly from actual historic record. The film makes it seem like LBJ is really dragging; the transcript shows that LBJ wanted MLK to create the rationale to help LBJ move Congress (and public opinion) towards passage of voting rights bill.


Original Post:

I don't usually teach about the modern Civil Rights movement until April, but if your students are going to see the new movie, Selma, it will be soon, so I figured I'd get this post in the bank, so to speak, right now.

I haven't even seen the film yet--hope to soon--but as soon as I heard it was coming out, I started to wonder these questions:

1. How historically accurate will the film be? 
2. What inaccuracies will there be and will they matter?
3. I always liked showing episode 6 of the outstanding Eyes on the Prize documentary: Bridge to Freedom which is about the march to Selma. Will teachers still use documentaries instead of full-length feature films? Would students be bored with a documentary if they've seen Selma? Will they see the feature film as "truth" and then question the story told by the documentary (keeping in mind that documentaries, just like history books, also have their own "versions" of history and leave certain points out and others in)?
4. Who will students respond to more, the real MLK as seen in Eyes on the Prize and other documentaries or the actor who plays him, David Oyelowo? How could any actor top the man himself?
5. When we internalize fictional accounts of history, what is lost? what is gained?
6. What larger questions does this raise about who "owns" history? How do the stories and versions of history we tell ourselves shape our understanding of the past?

Because I haven't seen the movie yet, I don't have my own opinion to share, but lots of other folks have. So below are a few resources I've pulled together which may be useful for you to read so you can address the questions and comments from your students. I'm sure there are many more out there, but it's a start.

• Ken Halla, on his US History Educator blog posted on this today. See his Resources on Selma, including some excellent ones from the LBJ Library.
• Elizabeth Drew, "'Selma' vs. History," in New York Review of Books - about how LBJ is portrayed as being more opposed to MLK than he really was.
• A few resources from NPR (National Public Radio), on their Code Switch blog, a site devoted to issues of race, culture and ethnicity:

reactions in Selma to the movie

"Selma backlash misses the point" - from Tufts University history professor Peniel E. Joseph. Really interesting. Says, "The real problem many critics have with this film is that it's too black and too strong." Ouch. 

"The Selma Criticism for How It Portrays Lyndon B. Johnson: Is It Fair?

• from the Washington Post: "The Movie Selma Has a Glaring Flaw"
• from Slate.com: "What Matters in Selma" - offers a contrary view from critics who claim the characterization of LBJ is flawed
• "Oscar Films and the Prison of Historical Accuracy," from Vulture.com, the entertainment branch of New York Magazine.
• From The Nation, "What 'Selma' Gets Right-and Wrong-about Civil Rights History"
• From The Huffington Post, "Why 'Selma' Got It Right"
• CNN.com: "From Selma to Ferguson and back: Has Anything Changed?"

An idea I'm thinking about, for when you do teach the Civil Rights movement: some sort of historical inquiry where students examine clips from some of the above articles and the historic record of Selma to make their own determination of either the accuracy of the film (this would require that students have seen the film, either on their own or a viewing that you arrange after class or something) or their own editorial about the extent to which historical accuracy in this film matters.

And for when/if you use Eyes on the Prize to teach about Selma or other parts of the Civil Rights movement, see the Study guide for Eyes on the Prize from Blackside Productions, the makers of the Eyes on the Prize. 200-plus page guide to the full film series with questions for each film.

Lesson ideas: September 11, History & Memory

Please see my updated version of this post on Substack. 

July 2016 update to original post: Check out this documentary collection from the Library of Congress about 9/11. Also, since I've wrote this post I now teach students who were born before 9/11. Many of them don't know the bare-bones basics. It is important to fill students in on that at the beginning of any lesson on the events of that day.

Original article:

Tomorrow will be the first time that the 9/11 museum will be open on the anniversary of the events of 9/11/01. This got me thinking about how differently we view events that we have lived through compared to those we haven't. Depending on the grade you are teaching this fall, your students were either not born, very little or at most five or six years old. But all of their teachers lived though it.

For those of us who are old enough to remember that day, teaching about it is a very different experience than teaching about past American tragedies. It is a far more visceral experience, I think. I remember what I was doing, where I was, how I felt...

But knowing where I was and how I felt is not the same thing as "knowing" all about what happened on September 11 and why. If you heard F.D.R. on the radio on December 8 talking about the previous day's attack on Pearl Harbor, that is not the same thing as understanding Japan's military ascendency in the Pacific or Roosevelt's efforts throughout the late 1930s to open Americans' eyes to the problems in Europe.

So the problems for historians, educators and the museum curators at the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum are complex ones which illustrate the potential contradictions between the goals of museums and teachers versus those of memorials. As pointed out by Jim Gardner, the Executive for the Legislative Archives, Presidential Libraries and Museum Services for the National Archives, "Museums are about understanding, about making meaning of the past. A memorial fulfills a different need; it's about remembering and evoking feelings in the viewer, and that function is antithetical to what museums do." (Quoted from New York Times article on challenges facing the 9/11 Museum.)

There are many things you could do in class to commemorate the day. Below is my idea for a class discussion on the ways commemorating 9/11 can get us to think about history and memory in a broader sense. Please note that the lesson has nothing to do with the events of 9/11 itself or why it happened, but rather focuses on how the way we think about 9/11 compares to how we think about other historical events, particularly tragic ones. And how such events should be remembered. Because it doesn't explain 9/11 itself, you may have to provide at least a little background information.

September 11, 2001: Examining History, Memory & Memorials

Note to teachers:

Below are a list of decisions museum curators at the National September 11 Memorial Museum had to make about what to display. Underneath each decision are examples of other related decisions/questions from other historic events. Each of these can be used separately or together as material for whole class or small group discussions. These are designed for 9-12th grade, but have been using them quite successfully with 7th and 8th graders. If you'd like a GoogleDoc version of this that you can reproduce for students, click here. If you scroll down to the very end of this post, I've linked to some other questions I came up with that might be good as either an intro or conclusion to the ideas below.

The Decisions:

1. Whether or not to include images of trapped victims leaping from the burning towers.

Actual decision made by museum: show photographs, but not video, and only if the person jumping cannot be identified.

Other historic example: In the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, 145 people were killed--mostly young, immigrant women. The tragedy brought renewed attention to the problems of factory workers and their safety. The event is recounted in most U.S. history textbooks. Witnesses to the event saw young girls jumping out of the window to their death. Should textbooks or your U.S. history teacher show you images of this or read accounts of it? How is this similar/different from the 9/11 example?

2. Whether or not to include photographs of the hijackers.

Actual decision made by museum: show photographs, but use the evidence photo images from the FBI that have a sticker on them, marking the hijackers as criminals (so they look like criminal mug shots). The size of the image will be 1 ½ X 2 inches each and displayed at a low angle, so visitors can choose whether or not to look at them.

Other historic examples:

Should we read about Adolf Hitler or other Nazi war criminals so as to better understand their motivations? Does doing so humanize them? Does humanizing them seem to “excuse” their crimes? Or does it help us understand what happened? Something in between?

Curators at the Oklahoma City Memorial Museum--the museum commemorating the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building (in which 168 people died) had to make a similar decision about displaying the photograph of Timothy McVeigh, the man responsible for the bombing. They chose to show it.

3. Whether or not to include “composites”--chunks of compressed floors that demonstrate the destructiveness of the impact of the crash into the towers. Family members of victims--many of whose bodies were not recovered--say that such pieces could contain body matter.

Actual decision made by museum: show one of the composites in a secluded alcove in the footprint of the north tower. The composite has been tested and there are no human remains. Nearby is a stand with a box of tissues.

Other historic example:

In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The purpose was to establish the rights of Indian tribes to reclaim human remains, sacred objects and other artifacts from federal agencies and museums. How should the interests of researchers and Native Americans be balanced? What about a skeleton that is 10,000 years old? Does that make a difference? See this article for an interesting example about Indian scalps displayed in a German museum.

Click here for an interactive look at some of the displays in the National September 11 Memorial Museum.

Click here for an article in the New York Post about the gift shop at the 9/11 museum.

Click here for a perspective on visiting the 9/11 museum written by a man who lost his sister in the attacks (You can get a sense of his ironic take from the title: "The Worst Day of My Life is Now New York's Hottest Tourist Attraction"). Click here for an excerpt from that article, along with my suggestions for questions to go along with it that you could use with students.

If you decide to use any of this material, let me know how it goes!