A Look at Ava DuVernay’s Selma, In Honor of the 49th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act

Writer/Director Ava DuVernay posted this photo from the set of her upcoming film Selma with the following passage:

“If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow. A psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them Jim Crow. And his children, too, learned to feed upon it, their last outpost of psychological oblivion. Our whole campaign in Selma has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation on the flagrant denial of that right, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland.” – Rev. Martin Luther King’s final speech after the SELMA marches. Today I salute the 49th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act being signed into law, and the bravery and intelligence it took to make it so.

In this photo, the real cover of Life with Martin Luther King and the actors playing those parts.

The cast, as follow:

Tim Roth – George Wallace
Giovanni Ribisi – Lee C. White
Carmen Ejogo — Coretta Scott King
Lorraine Toussaint — Amelia Boynton
Common — James Bevel
Cuba Gooding Jr. — Fred Gray
Tessa Thompson –Diane Nash
Alessandro Nivola — John Doar
David Oyelowo — Martin Luther King Jr.
Tom Wilkinson — President Lyndon B. Johnson