Has anyone seen The Butler?

[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.