Although "Selma," is currently getting major media coverage for being "Oscar snubbed" by the Motion Picture Academy, the film continues to draw criticism for playing fast and loose with the historical facts at its core.
D.T. Wright - son of the late Dallas County Sheriff's Deputy Doyle Wright, and a lifelong lawman himself - can now be added to the growing list of those who are troubled by the film's inaccuracies and want to set the record straight. Like President Lyndon B. Johnson's defenders, who've objected to depictions of LBJ as an adversary to King in the film, Wright objects to the way "Selma" depicts his father – who was at the center of the Annie Lee Cooper conflict – as well as the way people of Selma and neighboring towns are depicted as unanimously and unapologetically racist.
In a pivotal, visceral scene in the film, Sheriff James G. Clark viciously beats – blow after blow – a defenseless 55-year-old black woman, Cooper (played by Oprah Winfrey), with a nightstick. To amp up the drama and emotional impact, the film's director, Ava DuVernay, unfurls the scene in slow motion.
Despite the film's dramatic portrayal of the moment - and, now also because of it - there is still no clear picture of exactly what happened outside the Dallas County Courthouse on Jan. 25, 1965.
On that day King and hundreds of other Americans, black and white, watched as - depending on which accounts you believe - Cooper either caused the melee by punching Clark in the face, or she was attacked, unprovoked, by the sheriff, held down by two other deputies – including Doyle Wright – and hauled off to jail.
But, says Wright, "Selma wasn't all a bunch of racist rednecks and the cops there weren't just out there beating the shit out of people with truncheons because they were black. That's really my message."
In making his claims, Wright states that "Selma" is in fact an important film, but it's easy to detect the hurt his voice over any suggestion that his father was someone other than the person he and others still hold in high esteem.
"Everybody that knew him would say [to me], 'You're Doyle Wright's boy.' I'd say, 'Yes sir,' and they would say, 'Doyle is a good man.' And that meant the world to me," he says.
No doubt there will be those who'll argue that Wright may be preoccupied with the details of one scene in an important 127-minute-long feature. But that scene is the emotional linchpin of the film, and Wright is, after all, a lawman, trained to believe that details matter.
