On Wednesday, Jan. 18 and Thursday,
Jan. 19 at 8 p.m., the Longwood Student Diversity and Inclusion Council (SDIC) hosted two screenings in Wygal Auditorium to a small, but involved audience. The first film, "Citizen King," depicted the career of Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporters in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during their fight for civil rights for African Americans in the United States.
After a short interlude that forecasts the inevitable death of King, the film starts with King's activism in Birmingham and explains the difficulties of working in a city that had witnessed numerous atrocities against blacks. These included 50 unsolved bombings and a case in which an innocent black man was caught on the street by a mob of angry Caucasians and castrated.
The viciousness of the city did not deter King and his fellow civil rights workers. In fact, as history shows, Birmingham, after a long and difficult fight and rampant police brutality, was won.
King's work with presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson for a Civil Rights and Voting Rights Bill was also depicted. Kennedy and Johnson were largely persuaded after the Civil Rights Movement had shown its will to struggle for change. However, there was still huge resistance from both the South, largely active in the federal government and Jim Crow laws, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Edgar J. Hoover, which attempted to sabotage the Civil Rights Movement. Hoover's racial sentiments, his view of the movement as anti-establishment and his hatred of King fueled a massive internal and media smear campaign that even extended to Hoover calling King a liar after his Nobel Peace Prize win.
The difficulties of the King family, including threats on King's safety, the bombing of the family home and the revelation of King's infidelities, were shown against the backdrop of the movement, along with seldom told involvements of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago and King's meeting with the Black Panther Party under Stokely Carmichael. The film was cut short in the interest of time when the Black Power story was beginning to be told.
In a short Q&A session, audience members showed interest in what the movement had meant and the parts of it that they never knew about, such as the missions of racial segregation in Chicago slums.
The second showing, "X-Men: The Last Stand" was an examination of the Hollywood film in terms of race relations. The movie, showing a much celebrated and hated "cure" for being a mutant, spotlighted the largely nonviolent Charles Xavier and the warlike Magneto. The two sides were compared with those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Like many such films in the X-Men franchise and elsewhere in the superhero genre, the movie itself was fun, action-packed and sometimes campy. However, the point struck home. The violent aspirations of Magneto to prove the humans wrong and destroy them were doomed from the beginning and the tolerant, work-inside-the-system methods of Xavier were fated to succeed.
But, in spite of this, the audience was asked an important and very central question: Would you, if given the chance, change something about yourself to become more acceptable and more normal? The issue was discussed seriously and many different answers were given, but the audience was left with a distinct understanding of what was being questioned.
Shawn Gaines of the SDIC hosted both nights, and the second night was co-hosted by Chad Ownby. Both screening could be judged as successful and as the continuation of Longwood's efforts to educate on the importance of a consciously multi-flavored society aware of its past and present.
