Imagine watching a mean-spirited white farmer shoot your father dead in the cotton fields shortly after taking advantage of your mother in the shed. Then imagine, after several years of serving as a household servant, walking away into a world unknown, with few possessions, and walking past two black men hanging from nooses on a public street in Georgia. And somehow you first find a job serving affluent white people and ignoring their comments, and then finding your way to a fancy hotel in Washington, D.C., on the recommendation of your boss, who turned down the opportunity, and after several years finding that your performance leads you to the White House to serve as a new butler. By now it is 1957, Dwight Eisenhower is president, and you are a witness to history as he sends federal troops to Arkansas to enforce desegregation of public schools.
That is only the beginning of the story in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, the movie my wife and I saw at the theater last night. The violence, however, is not at all gratuitous but instructive about a piece of American history that many would still prefer to forget or ignore. Cecil Gaines served under presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan, and lived long enough to see the inauguration of Barack Obama. His wife, played by Oprah Winfrey, lived almost but not quite long enough. Along the way, they witnessed the assassination of John Kennedy and watched their oldest son, Louis, attend Fisk University in Nashville, where he joined the Freedom Riders—against his father’s wishes—survived numerous encounters with the law before the law finally changed, and suffered the death of their younger son, Charles, in Vietnam. He was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, at a time when Cecil and Louis were estranged as a result of Louis’s involvement in the Black Panthers. Louis eventually returned to school, earned a Master’s degree in political science, ran for Congress, and led protests against apartheid in South Africa. His father finally reconciled with him at that time after retiring from his job during the administration of Ronald Reagan, who opposed sanctions against the South African regime. The movie depicts Reagan, as Cecil announced his retirement, wondering whether he was on the wrong side of history with regard to civil rights. As ever, Gaines tried to avoid answering the question. But he proceeded to reconcile with Louis by joining his protest.
Although the pace of such a biopic is sometimes uneven, as would be the case with most movies whose story stretches over nine decades, it is nonetheless an extremely worthwhile contribution to public understanding of where our nation has been with regard to race relations, and how far it has come, and more importantly, how it got from point A to point B. It shows that division of opinion and perspective was every bit as alive and poignant in black as in white America over those many years. We watch presidents and others change their hearts and minds as a result of experience. It is important, in 2013, to remember that awareness of the full range of the American experience was not as prevalent a century ago as now, that we have not always had 24-hour news, whatever that has contributed, and that for many blacks in the Old South, leaving home was a frightening experience because their world had been so narrow. It took real fear and despair to push people northward.
But the sight of those hanging men, the vicious responses to lunch counter sit-ins, and the burning of freedom buses by robed Klansmen helped provide that impetus, along with the sense that there had to be new opportunities elsewhere. But the violence also has long troubled me in another sense.
As a Christian, I have never, ever found it possible to reconcile such behavior by the southern white community with the so-called Bible Belt affinity for religion. I grew up in Ohio, with some distance from the Old South, but I knew of it even as a teenager, watching television news footage of civil rights protests in Alabama and Mississippi. It just did not add up. I am well aware of the tendency to accept the way things are, and tradition and the status quo are not always bad things. But the sheer brutality required to enforce segregation cannot be reconciled with the teachings of Jesus no matter how hard one tries, no matter how desperately one wants to believe in his own privileges in an oppressive system. There is a willful stubbornness about clinging to such beliefs in the face of all the evidence of their unfairness. I am well aware that these things were not limited to the South, though the lynchings largely were.
The reconciliation of father and son in The Butler is the reconciliation of two very different paths to personal and political liberation, and the discovery that Cecil and Louis, coming from two different times and generations, had more in common in the end than either realized during most of their long estrangement. Their conflict is a reminder to us all of the stress imposed on all of us who struggle to find a path to a better world. Both made meaningful contributions, and both were heroes, each in his own way. If this movie has a core lesson to impart, I believe that is it.
Jim Schwab