How Selma helped me appreciate organ pipes
Sitting beside my best friend, we tensed as policemen clubbed civil rights protesters. We teared up as Martin Luther King Jr. marched alongside James Bevel, as Coretta Scott King talked with Malcolm X, and as the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee strained to relate to their elders. Selma was an experience: visceral, soulful, inspiring, and shocking.
A visual image that struck me was based in sound: microphone before King, organ pipes behind him. Time and again as King preached into a microphone at the pulpit, organ pipes framed his background. The “voice” of the civil rights movement broadcasted literally through electronic amplification and symbolically through wind propelled through the organ’s metal. The visual and sonic displays offer a new prospective on older ways of thinking about preaching and power.
A great deal has been written about Selma. Several authors have challenged the film’s treatment of Lyndon Johnson. Others have complained about the representation of Coretta Scott King, who is oddly marked as having “never married again” in the closing lines. Identifying historical “inaccuracies” seems to be an important feature of engaging the film.
