> From: James McCall
> Article on "artistic license" in Spielberg's "Lincoln"

Thanks for that link. Here's something related, and please forgive me if I 
already reported it in this forum (which I don't think I did):

In the New York Times op-ed "In Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’ Passive Black 
Characters," the historian Kate Masur charged that “it’s disappointing that 
in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United 
States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for 
white men to liberate them,” even though for “some 30 years, historians have 
been demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation.” 
The movie, she says, “reinforces, even if inadvertently, the outdated 
assumption that white men are the primary movers of history.”

The link is 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/opinion/in-spielbergs-lincoln-passive-black-characters.html 
. And here's one more paragraph about it from me for anyone willing to hear 
in yet another way what I keep saying about Fort Monroe:

“Inadvertently.” Key word from the historian. She never mentioned Fort 
Monroe, but she obviously could have. This same kind of inadvertent, 
unintentional presumption of Black passive fecklessness still pervades 
public understanding of the freedom movement that began there shortly after 
Fort Sumter and spread throughout the South. The presumption tends to grant 
the dignity of being named only to the white general who reacted on May 24 
to actions decisively taken on May 23 by the Black self-emancipators Frank 
Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend. You can see the presumption’s 
pervasiveness in Virginia’s insistence on celebrating May 24 as that freedom 
story’s anniversary, rather than May 23, the day when Black people actually 
began it. In other words, this historian’s complaint about the movie’s gross 
underestimation of Black contributions is precisely congruent with 
complaints about underestimation of the reasons why historian Edward L. 
Ayers calls May 23, 1861, the start of the greatest moment in American 
history.

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