Has anyone seen The Butler?

[jobeterob]

Close enough to Motown.

We were taken by our son last night.

They say it is very popular and going to be nominated for lots of awards.

It was was heart tugging here and there and very inclusive of everything like Oprah can be.

What did you think?

[Kamasu_Jr]

Where's the Motown connection? This might get more responses if it were in the Clubhouse. I saw it with my parents and some other couples. It was a good film with an amazing cast, especially Forest Whitaker and Oprah, as the couple whose love story is one of the film's subplots.
It was like a trip back through time for my dad, who remembers all of the significant events that take place in the film. It was really deep for him because he could think about what he was doing when Kennedy was president. He and my mom lived through all of the presidents DEPICTED in the film.
My dad marched with his father during Martin Luther King's march in Detroit. My grandfather was a Detroit auto factory worker and a union man and labor was very involved in that march. My dad was 8 or 9 when Dr. King led that march, but had forgotten about it until he saw ...The Butler. My mom said it made her think how fortunate she was to have been born in Detroit and not Mississippi or Alabama. She does not remember much discrimination in Detroit even though she had an aunt who married a white man there and it was tough for them. But she says her parents often sheltered her from racism. She saw the Civil Rights movement on the network news but was not involved. She went anywhere she pleased and never personally encountered much racism in Detroit. That's not implying that Detroit was perfect or devoid of racial problems. However, Civil Rights laws were on her side and she was aware of her rights. My dad says his experience was similar, but he knew that whites held most of the political and economic power back then, but he saw that change - eventually.
Dad remembers the Black Panthers and might have joined but he was 10 or 12 years too young. He says he went through a militancy phase in which he could not relate to anything from "white" culture. He pretty much rejected mainsteam Hollywood films, didn't listen to anything but black music and wanted to "kill whitey" or see whitey suffer. However, moving to Ohio and attending college changed that. He's just 59, but says ...The Butler made him feel older.
The other couple we saw the film with were southerners from rural Mississippi, and their perspective was quite different from that of my parents'. They remember 'white only' signs and discrimination and racism as constant. Their parents could not vote even though the law said they could. They remember Medgar Evers being killed and Dr. King's assassination. As youths, they became active in the Civil Rights movement, while my parents were not heavily involved, but benefited from what had been done by others. The southerners remembered not being able to eat in many restaurants and so on. It was interesting sitting and listening to these older people talk about their experiences after the seeing Lee Daniel's The Butler.
A lot of whites are buying tickets to ...The Butler, just like they did The Help. But it does not seem to be changing much. My generation OF African Americans or BLACKS are still dealing with racism, high unemployment, black on black crime and so on.

[soulster]

I'm waiting for it to come out on blu-ray so I can eat what I want, scratch my butt and fart.

I don't have the time or money to go see it at a theater.

[thomas96]

I'm waiting for it to come out on blu-ray so I can eat what I want, scratch my butt and fart.

I don't have the time or money to go see it at a theater.

Totally agree. I never go to the movie theaters these days unless it's with the children.

[warehserat2911]

I saw it with a couple of my friends during my trip to Dallas. I thought it was an amazing film but the lunch counter scene was difficult to watch. It brought me to tears to see what some went thru to try to get us the rights we all deserve.

[Kamasu_Jr]

I saw it with a couple of my friends during my trip to Dallas. I thought it was an amazing film but the lunch counter scene was difficult to watch. It brought me to tears to see what some went thru to try to get us the rights we all deserve.

That was a difficult scene to watch. A friend of mine has written a screenplay called Freedom Summer about the young people who came south on buses for freedom.

[Roberta75]

I saw it with a couple of my friends during my trip to Dallas. I thought it was an amazing film but the lunch counter scene was difficult to watch. It brought me to tears to see what some went thru to try to get us the rights we all deserve.

A real shameful time in our countrys history. It was 50 years ago today 15 sticks of dynamite kill 4 young girls attending church. While weve come far there lets remember what happened and remember that 50 years later there are still hateful people out there that still show no remorse or shame.

Lets remember those 4 young women in our prayers tonight along with all the others who suffered while fighting for our civil rights.

http://www.sarahcollinsproject.com/.

Roberta

[robb_k]

I find it difficult to believe that African Americans in Detroit during the 1960s somehow were not affected by discrimination and mal-treatment by the racist White population there [[as in all US big cities). I saw plenty of it in Chicago and Detroit during The 1960s. When I first came to USA for a visit in 1953 I saw Swastikas and anti-Jewish graffiti and signs on walls, and, at Michiana Shores at the Indiana/Michigan border, I saw a sign on a beach that stated: "No dogs, no "Nig----" and no Jews allowed on this beach".

Now, if they were treating Jews like that, they were treating Blacks ten times worse.

That must have been one incredible job of sheltering of their kids to have them not personally been affected. Still, they must have witnessed others being treated terribly.

[edafan]

I find it difficult to believe that African Americans in Detroit during the 1960s somehow were not affected by discrimination and mal-treatment by the racist White population there [[as in all US big cities). I saw plenty of it in Chicago and Detroit during The 1960s. When I first came to USA for a visit in 1953 I saw Swastikas and anti-Jewish graffiti and signs on walls, and, at Michiana Shores at the Indiana/Michigan border, I saw a sign on a beach that stated: "No dogs, no "Nig----" and no Jews allowed on this beach".

Now, if they were treating Jews like that, they were treating Blacks ten times worse.

That must have been one incredible job of sheltering of their kids to have them not personally been affected. Still, they must have witnessed others being treated terribly.

Ignorance like you write about is still around.
Hopefully we can change it little by little.

My late brother-in-law once wrote a newspaper column
castigating America for not downing Archie Bunker's bigotry.
My brother-in-law was right.

edafan

[Kamasu_Jr]

Robb K, I think two big differences in your experience from that of my parents is that they were probably younger than you were and children are usually treated very differently than young adults or grown adults. My parents were also Americans, born in this country. They had rights that visitors didn't. Now I didn't say my parents never experienced any discrimination, they just didn't encounter or remember much of it a majority of the time. They were children at the time many Civil Rights laws and legislation were signed. It was the law that they could go wherever they wanted and be served just like whites. Did they go to St. Clair Shores or down south? No. They knew there might be trouble if they did. They were children whose parents had come from the south, so they knew about racism, but their experience was different and their parents were instrumental in this. They [ my grandparents ] wanted their children to have a different life. But of course they were affected by racism, though it was sometimes subtle or indirect. The neighborhoods they grew up in were predominantly working class/black, definitely due to racism, so there weren't many whites living where they lived. Most of the businesses they frequented were managed by blacks and sometimes owned by blacks; those that weren't still depended on blacks for survival so their policies were often different. So my parents didn't encounter many whites except those working as teachers [MOST OF THEIR TEACHERS in Detroit WERE BLACK] or police officers. And so in a way, they were sheltered or kept from seeing things that probably were racist.

[soulster]

My parents were born in the 1920s, which would make them part of the WWII generation.

My mother never spoke to use about racism, so we kids were never prepared to encounter it growing up. We just had to 'deal with it when it came up". Unfortunately, my mother didn't know how to deal with it, either, and she no doubt experienced a lot of it in her small town. She grew up in a military town just like we grew up in, and we always lived in mixed neighborhoods/towns. We never knew what it was like to live in an all-Black area. Well, I did for a few months in Texas. It was strange to be removed from most White people.

I was told by my uncle that where my father grew up, the klan wanted to hang him because he dated a White girl, or something like that, in the 40s, so my grandparents snuck him out to Chicago to live with relatives. He also never talked to us about dealing with racism, but gave us generalities on how the world worked, and how "old pekerwoods" treat Blacks.

[rrussi]

I saw it and thought it was a great movie. However, they changed things in the lead character's life, including his name. He was Eugene Allen and he and his wife had only one son who was neither a freedom rider or a viet nam soldier. In fact, I saw him interviewed on ET. I think they included those things because that was actually going on during his tenure at the white house. He also actually started in the late 40s under Truman.