FREEDOM SONG: A Reviewer’s Reaction

Freedom Song is a story about the struggle to fight the individual’s civil rights against the society’s discrimination of “color”. “If not me, who? If not now, when?” a famous line from the story asked by the major character in the film—Owen Walker, a black teen growing up in Mississippi during the 1960s—a time when Jim Crow segregation laws were not legal, they were looked on by many Whites as being the way God wanted it. Owen’s involvement in the civil rights movement started when, in his younger days, his father slapped him due to his disobedience in entering the waiting room “Whites Only”. Inspired by his uncle Jonah and by the Freedom Riders he saw on TV, Owen acquired this feeling of getting revenge and dreams of the day that he can go back to the waiting room.

The story told in Freedom Song predates the jadedness I sometimes feel about the lip service that is being done about the movement nowadays. Weber said that culture, being autonomous, is shaped by individual orientation of rational self-interest. As the individuals form collectivity or societal level, they are becoming the essential elements in the realm of politics. In this film, the Blacks are the subject or point of analysis of how culture changed people’s beliefs of acquiring civil rights. In forming the movement, they became the essential elements in the realm of politics. The film’s story is so rich and historically important. Unlike others we have read in history books, the story was told from the standpoint of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The people in the movement could be considered as the unsung heroes who put their lives in risk for what they thought was just. Another aspect I totally reacted to was the portrayal of just what it meant to show non-violence in the violently environment of racist rage. It was mentioned in the film that being non-violent and practicing non-violence is a political strategy that really works. The civil rights movement seems to be simply narrowed to the Blacks being not allowed to vote, not to borrow books from the library or to sit in cafeterias and be served. By concentrating in these raised issues, the story almost underestimates the fullness of the struggle for civil rights. Still, even with these, Freedom Song remains an influential movie about a period where some people want to forget and other people never can.

The film is written for those people who need a swift slapped in the face to make us remember our responsibility to signed up to vote and to take the chance we have to vote. It is because it is difficult to deal with corrupt officials—with their lies and fake smiles, and attitude of caring only for the people they supposed to serve when the time for election comes. All of us owe our freedom to those who first struggle for it and led us to ultimate sacrifice in order for us to get hold of the right of every citizen—to vote and make our elected officials work for all of us for the change and for the better of all the nations in the world.