By Mansfield Frazier
Lee Daniels superbly directed the all-star ensemble of Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, John Cusack and Jane Fonda in The Butler, the historical drama that focused on the life of Cecil Gaines, a While House butler who served eight presidents during his tenure.
But, alas, the film might only attract a limited audience … something that has nothing to do with the stellar performances turned in by the cast or the plotline of the film.
The problem is pain. The film deftly and accurately tracks the beginnings of the civil rights movement, occasionally using actual footage of the brutal treatment black and white students received at the hands of bigoted southerners as they attempted to integrate lunch counters and engage in Freedom Rides across the South.
Gaines’ own son, Louis — much to the butler’s chagrin and dismay — is one of the students. He’d sent his progeny off to Fisk University to get a college education, not to become a student radical … a feeling that must have been prevalent at the time among many black parents who had learned to live a life of accommodation, and yes, even subservience. The generational conflict between youth who were demanding change and elders who were afraid for their offspring’s lives tore many families apart, as it did this one.
Nonetheless, as accurate and compelling as the storyline is, The Butler might suffer the same fate as the excellent 1991-93 TV series I’ll Fly Away. It starred Sam Waterson as Forrest Bedford, a southern lawyer in the late 1950s … a man generally content with his privileged life, and Regina Taylor as the family maid Lily Harper, who is beginning to question the order of things in the South. The winds of change are blowing all around them, and as Bedford becomes increasingly involved with civil rights cases, Lilly Harper, who cares for his children, begins her own journey of political and personal awareness.
Despite the fact the show won widespread — and well-deserved — critical acclaim, it lasted only two seasons, for pretty much the same reason The Butler might not do all that well in movie houses: The pain of it all.
Blacks — especially younger blacks — generally don’t care to see depictions of the racist and dehumanizing conditions their parents and grandparents were forced to live under during the era of segregation, and many whites are deeply ashamed of what was done to other human beings by their forbearers. Too painful.
What George Santayana said in his book Reason in Common Sense, “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it,” probably doesn’t apply to race relations in America today. There’s no circumstance in which the country will ever regress to the ugly past of the 1950s and ’60s. However, the more willing we are to embrace that past — no matter how ugly it was, to understand what caused it, to deal honestly with it, and most importantly to learn from it — the more enhanced are our chances of moving toward a harmonious and racially pacific future in America … the one we all deserve.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.