People have been writing about civil rights for years, but it’s taken Hollywood until now to warm up to the subject (of course, not enough). Bill Morris traces the history of the movement’s cinematic representations leading up to Ava DuVernay’s recent triumph:
Movies about the civil rights movement — the successful ones– have tended to follow one of two strategies. They focus either on the well-known leaders or on the faceless foot soldiers — or, for lack of better terms, on the “big” people or the “little” people.
