On Saturday night I went to see the movie Green Book, about the journey of a black piano virtuoso and his white driver on a concert tour throughout much of the nation, including the Deep South, in 1962. This was after the Freedom Rides, but before the “I Have a Dream” speech, the Civil Rights Bill, and most of the other great markers of the movement.
I thought it was a spellbinding and important movie highly worth seeing, especially by those too young to have lived through that era. Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen give stunning performances. Ali radiates dignity and class; if you pause to remember that the actor who portrays Tony the slob is the same man who perfectly portrayed Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, you will realize that Mortensen is one amazing actor.
But this is far more than a movie, especially during a month when we pause to remember African American history. Some sophisticated critics have criticized the film, saying it reinforced too many stereotypes and presented the main characters as playing stock roles, almost cartoon characters. Well, there might be some slight truth in that.
That is, if you are extremely well versed in the history of this era. But most people aren’t. How many young people of either race know that a black man, no matter how sophisticated or affluent, couldn’t try on a suit at any clothing store in the Deep South as late as the early 1960s?
How many know that the greatest black performers in the world often could not use the restrooms in the concert halls where they played, or eat in the same restaurants with their white backup players and assistants? I’d guess a lot of younger people don’t.
They don’t have any idea of the full range of what life was like for African-Americans back in the days of Jim Crow. The white tough guy Tony Vallelonga as played by Mortensen in this movie certainly is no racial liberal when the movie begins, but even he is soon disgusted with the way blacks were treated in the pre-Civil and Voting Rights Act South.
And the film makers could have easily depicted that reality more shockingly and much, much more violently had they chosen to do so. Yes, the film has a happy ending that seems contrived, and which may not have been real. But that doesn’t matter.
We’re still striving toward that ending today. This movie shows us how far we’ve come since 1962, and it isn’t bad to be reminded of the world into which I was born, a world where a large part of this nation lived under an apartheid very little different from South Africa.
Everyone knows the philosopher George Santayana’s saying that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That may not be completely true. But what is certain is this: Those who don’t know history will never have a clue as to what is going on today or how the future is likely to unfold. Nor can you repress or hide inconvenient facts about the past.
Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly found that out this weekend when he tried to suppress an issue of the Dearborn Independent that dealt with the original Henry Ford’s nasty anti-Semitism, and then fired the editor, Instead of covering up the past, the mayor, besides making himself look very bad, succeeded only in focusing national attention on what he wanted to hide.
You have to know who you are and where you’ve been before you can try to be better. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous know that.
It’s time all of us learned that too.
