REMEMBERING SELMA
In David Denby’s mostly laudatory review of the film “Selma,” he is critical of the scenes depicting Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s confrontation with John Lewis and James Forman, “the young leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee” (“Living History,” December 22nd & 29th). Denby writes that the two S.N.C.C. leaders are portrayed as “angry young men.” During the movement, when I was twenty-one and Lewis was twenty-two, we were roommates in Atlanta. At the time, Forman, who was born in 1928, was like a father to me, as he was to many people in the S.N.C.C. He may have been “angry,” but he was just as old as Dr. King. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to reverse the mass false consciousness created by popular films. The events depicted…
