Does Black Reality Still Go to the Back of Hollywood’s Bus? : Fact-Based Drama Triggers Question of Perspective in Telling Civil Rights Story

Early on in “Unconquered,” the CBS-TV movie airing Sunday at 9 p.m., Martin Luther King Jr. is talking to Alabama State Sen. Richmond Flowers Sr. about the Montgomery bus boycott.

There is a degree of respect, if not cordiality, between the black preacher and the white politician. Flowers tells King that if the boycott succeeds, the city will change. “We pull off the boycott, senator, the world will never be the same,” replies King.

And then the story, which starts in 1955 and spans about a dozen years and 2 1/2 TV hours, switches back to Richmond Flowers Sr. and to his son Richmond Flowers Jr., who are white.

“Unconquered” is the most recent in a series of highly visible fact-based dramas set in the midst of the struggle of blacks for civil rights. Like the feature films “Mississippi Burning” and “Cry Freedom,” the TV movie has raised the issue of how blacks fit into dramatizations of that struggle.

In the 1987 film “Cry Freedom,” the story of South African black nationalist leader Steven Biko is secondary to that of white anti-apartheid editor Donald Woods. In “Mississippi Burning,” which goes into wide national release this weekend, the movie begins with the assassination of three civil rights workers, then becomes a story about two fictional FBI men who track down their killers. Now, with “Unconquered,” some are critical of still another production that looks at that turbulent era through the eyes of whites--especially on the eve of King’s birthday anniversary celebration.

In “Unconquered,” Richmond Flowers Sr. goes on to become state attorney general, an antagonist of Gov. George Wallace and, as the actual stories of the time noted, a “lonely voice of moderation in Alabama.”

A small delicate child with asthma who is forced to wear bulky corrective shoes that are anathema to him, Richmond Jr. is determined to play football and, with “Chariots of Fire”-like music in the background, goes on to become not only a football player but also a high-hurdles champion in college.

King appears in three more scenes in the movie--and one time, off camera, giving a speech toward the end of the Selma marches about putting an end to segregation while a montage of scenes including Flowers Jr. running with a black athlete appears on screen.

Meanwhile, Rosa Parks, the 42-year-old seamstress who began the boycott when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montogomery bus, is neither specifically depicted nor mentioned. That boycott marked the birth of the civil rights movement

“The genesis of the project was totally separate and apart from that,” noted Norman Powell, vice president of CBS entertainment productions. “We had no idea we could make a deal. It just became an opportunity . . . After I showed it to management, they saw (King’s birthday) as a target of opportunity.”

Regarding the focus on whites, Powell said CBS thought there was “a great point of view on that story from the journey of the Richmond Flowers family which was really unique. A major character is Martin Luther King. I think what we did was take a unique story of two people (Flowers father and son) whose courage and commitment during a time which was terribly unpopular . . .”

Asked whether the network would ever do a movie about Rosa Parks, Powell replied: “Presumably so, certainly .”

“There are white stories and black stories,” he noted, “and a lot of people who make enormous sacrifices and exhibit great courage. What we did was we found a story so compelling we wanted to go ahead and make it. It happened to be white. It wasn’t a conscious decision not to do a black film, but a decision to do a film that illuminated the context of our time.

“We didn’t have a choice,” Powell added. “We didn’t have a black story and a white story. We had a story we just found so compelling we wanted to tell it.”

CBS has done a number of shows with a black main character, he said. The one that immediately came to mind for Powell was the story of Marva Collins, a black Chicago schoolteacher and the difficulties she faced.

Willis Edwards, president of the NAACP’s Beverly Hills-Hollywood chapter and executive producer of the Image Awards for individuals in movies, TV and recording that portray a positive image of blacks, asserted that “what is happening in the entertainment industry is called economic racism. There aren’t black producers, directors and writers being able to get in the door to pitch their products so our story being told by us will never get told. It will always be from a white perspective.

“ ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste,’ and that’s what’s happening in the entertainment industry. There are no black executives to make decisions to allow other blacks to come in the door. . . .

He noted as an exception the airing tonight at 11:30 p.m. on NBC-TV a tape of the Image Awards.

“ ‘Mississippi Burning’ was very misleading,” added Edwards, joining a chorus of protest from both blacks and whites about what they consider second-class treatment of blacks. “It’s like nobody black really did anything. Everybody white was the hero, and (it looks as if) we had no heroes at all.”

“Unconquered,” Edwards noted, is about a white family “but why have they not told the story of black families within the context of the civil rights movement? Even (the story of slain civil rights leader) Medgar Evers could not get on national TV. Only PBS aired ‘For Us the Living,’ which his wife Myrlie Evers tried to get on ABC, CBS and NBC. Look at Rosa Parks. Why has no one done a story about this woman who single-handedly started a revolution in America?”

Zev Braun, executive producer of CBS’ “Tour of Duty” said he was so outraged by the point of view of “Mississippi Burning” that he immediately resolved to create a television movie or miniseries that looks at the civil rights movement from a black perspective. Several days ago, Braun began discussions with Myrlie Evers about doing Medgar Evers’ story, as well as how she carried on as an activist following his assassination.

“ ‘Mississippi Burning’ was such a well-done movie, (but) I said, wait a minute--the civil rights movement was not about these little Bobby Kennedy clones, these FBI guys, who ran around winning the civil rights movement for black folks,” Braun said. “After seeing that movie, I’ve determined that I’m going to do the story right. To take away the civil rights movement from blacks is like taking the Holocaust away from Jews.”

Dick Lowry, “Unconquered” producer and director, noted that originally the work had started out as a feature-length movie, but no one would buy it. “The movie did not come about as a civil rights movie,” said Lowry, “but about an extremely interesting family who had experienced very unique physical, social and political pressures that did play out against the background of the civil rights movement . . . The absolute genesis of the story was an article inpublished in Sports Illustrated, ‘The Winning Son of a Dedicated Loser’ (1966).

“This is about a very unique family, where ‘Mississippi Burning’ is totally a civil rights movie,” Lowry added. “I’m a big (“Mississippi Burning” director) Alan Parker fan, but I’m a little more pleased, comfortable with the way we dealt with civil rights than the way they did. I’ll be very blunt with you--I would not be as comfortable taking a story whose genesis was so steeped in a specific real-life incident and fictionalizing it to the degree done in that movie. But I’ll defend the film makers’ right to do that to the very end.”

Yet specific facts are loosely played with in “Unconquered.” The tragedy of four young girls killed in a Birmingham church when it was firebombed in 1963 is treated as a brief scene in the TV movie--but in “Unconquered” three girls die.

More dramatically, Richmond Flowers Sr. never visited King in the Birmingham jail-- although Flowers’ insistence that King not be harmed is accurate--nor could King have paid a return visit after Flowers was convicted of extortion conspiracy charges. However, Flowers Sr., now practicing “a little law” in Dothan, Ala., said they did have several conversations about racism.

Flowers, who served 18 months in federal prison, began his sentence in 1972, four years after King’s assassination. Flowers, who always maintained he was framed because of his views, was later pardoned by former President Jimmy Carter.

Yet in “Unconquered,” there is King visiting Flowers in jail; on the radio in the background President Lyndon Johnson announces that he will not run for another term. Johnson gave that speech on March 31, 1968. Four days later in Memphis, King was assassinated.

“All these things are degrees of gray,” Lowry maintained. “We took a real conversation between Martin Luther King and Richmond Flowers and changed its physical location. We didn’t fictionalize conversation.”

Peter Coyote, who portrays Flowers Sr., said he is “shocked by the myopia of the press. They are concentrating exclusively on chronology where this is a story about the human spirit. It is a made artifact, and to make it the artist employs legitimate, fictional devices of compression, substitution, emphasis.”

Coyote, who was former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr.’s cultural adviser for eight years and a chairman of the California Arts Council, places himself on both sides of the controversy about the role of blacks in civil rights dramas.

“Is it any surprise to anyone that we live in a racist country?” he began carefully, dictating his response down to the punctuation. “That’s one part of the equation. The other part is demographic. Whoever put up the capital to make (‘Unconquered’) is trying to maximize the return by maximizing the audience. And I suppose with that kind of thinking, they make a crude assumption that blacks are 12% of the population and that whites won’t be interested.

“I think it’s a stupid assumption,” Coyote added, “but anyone who thinks it isn’t being made is being disingenuous. Doesn’t it tell you something that the mass media have waited 20-something years to tell this story at all? Just as we did with Vietnam. Do you really think that people who put up the money don’t have inner clocks that tell them when the subject matter is sufficiently distanced to be safe?

“However, you might ask yourself,” Coyote continued, “if these fears and assertions were correct, why did ‘Color Purple’ make so much money, and why do Toni Morrison’s and James Baldwin’s and Alex Haley’s books and (the TV show) ‘Roots’ make so much money?”

“I also think that it’s legitimate for an artist to tell the story the way he wants to tell it. And I don’t think (writer) Pat Conroy’s decision to focus on a white family is an illegitimate decision . . . I have no more patience with liberal propaganda and bullying of an artist than I do with conservative (propaganda), and in this day and age, with blatant manipulation by all sides, I think the artist is the last bastion of integrity and sanity.”

Times staff writer Diane Haithman also contributed to this story.