Scheduled for nation-wide release this week,
Amazing Grace is a hagiographic treatment of
the life and career of William Wilberforce, the
parliamentary opponent of the slave trade in
Great Britain. (The films title is derived from
the hymn written by John Lawton, a reformed
sea-captain and slave-trader played by Albert
Finney.) In the press notes, director Michael Apted states:
"This is a great moment in British history, and I
wanted to portray it as a generational battlethe
young men taking on the older generationlike
Kennedys and their Camelot court were to America in the early sixties."
Ironically, this was exactly the political role
of William Wilberforce. Using the language and
gestures of reform, his gradualism helped to
maintain a cruel racist system that forces to his
left were far more interested in abolishing.
In an article on JFK that I wrote for Revolution
Magazine in New Zealand a couple of years ago, I took note of the following:
>>Not only were the Kennedys hostile to the
Civil Rights Commission; they appointed 5
segregationist judges to the federal bench,
including Harold Cox, who had referred to blacks
as niggers and chimpanzees. Robert F. Kennedy
preferred Cox to Thurgood Marshall whom he
described as basically second-rate. Kennedy
frequently turned to Mississippi Senator James
Eastland for advice on appointments. According to
long-time activist Virginia Durr, Eastland would
invite people over for the weekend and tell them
to pick out a nigger girl and a horse! That was
his way of showing hospitality.<<
If you want to find out about William
Wilberforces true attitudes toward slaves, you
wont find it in Apsteads sanitized biopic. For
that the best source is Jack Gratuss 1973
Monthly Review book The Great White Lie:
Slavery, Emancipation and Changing Racial
Attitudes. The film was meant to commemorate the
200th anniversary of the passing of the bill that
allowed the slave trade in the British Empire, an
event that constitutes the climactic scene.
What it does not make clear is that the bill did
not abolish slavery itself, which would persist
in Jamaica and other British colonies for another
30 years. When younger and more militant
abolitionists pressed Wilberforce to enter
legislation to that effect, he replied that
because of the effect which long continuance of
abject slavery produces on the human mind
I look
to the improvement of their minds, and to the
diffusion among them of those domestic charities
which will render them more fit, than I fear they
now are, to bear emancipation.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/02/18/amazing-grace/
