前程百利小编为大家带来托福阅读材料。历史传记题材电影《塞尔玛》聚焦美国民权斗士马丁·路德·金1965年组织的“由塞尔玛向蒙哥马利进军”行动。文章的难词已经标示出来，希望大家可以学习到相关知识，并通过不断的阅读练习提高自己的托福阅读能力。
The movie “Selma” takes us back half a century to one of the most stirring and momentous(重大的;与它形近的momentary是暂时的的意思) events of that era: the march that helped secure passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, finally bringing the franchise(选举权) to millions of people who supposedly had been granted it nearly a century before. Some have criticized the film for attributing to(把……归因于/归功于) President Lyndon B. Johnson a couple of actions for which there is little or no historical evidence. Some have speculated that it got fewer Academy Award nominations(奥斯卡提名) than it deserved, in part because of the controversy over(注意介词) whether it contained distortions(扭曲，篡改) of history.
But the truth is that Lyndon Johnson’s stature(声望) as a champion of civil rights legislation will survive any movie misrepresentation, and “Selma” will, we’d guess, be watched for years to come — on screens, phones and devices yet to be invented — as an inspirational tale of a great American leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The truly history-making significance of that bloody police assault on peaceful marchers(示威者) at Selma, Ala., 50 years ago lies in the discrediting of a far more pernicious(有害的) distortion of history, one that became firmly established imparts of the country and was accepted, if not endorsed, by much of the rest of society. It began after Reconstruction, the brief period following the Civil War when newly freed slaves gained the right to vote and, in many places, elected black people to office. Reconstruction was ended by violent resistance from many white Southerners and by a general lack of will in the rest of the country to pursue the business of racial justice any further. A new mythology was created to discredit the short-lived venture in black participation in government: Reconstruction rule was portrayed as dictatorial and black officeholders as uniformly corrupt and incompetent.
This “history” was represented in films such as “Birth of a Nation “and (less malevolently(有恶意的;虽然作为爱情故事更为家喻户晓，《乱世佳人》也是American Studies的经典材料。故事背景中的南方，与站在歌颂北方与民主的胜利的立场上的人常描述的残酷、落后的南方很不相同。《乱世佳人》里的南方是田园牧歌式，种植园主合黑人奴隶的关系是比较和谐的，劳动图景也不会让人联想到剥削与压迫。这是一部非常有趣的小说，虽然文学价值不怎么高，却极其受欢迎，同时还是研究美国历史与文化的一项重要文本。)) “Gone With the Wind.” It permeated(渗透) many other parts of popular culture, was accepted as largely true in school textbooks in many parts of the country and influenced some of our proudest national institutions in ways that shame us to this day: West Point, for example, had no black cadets(学员) after Reconstruction until 1932, when Benjamin O. Davis (later to command the Tuskegee Airmen) was admitted, and then spent four years being shunned(避开) by his classmates.
Underlying all the hurtful discrimination, of course, was force(force单用指武力或暴力) and violence, whether official, unofficial or a combination of the two. It took the form of unequal justice in the courts and on the streets, and of community-sanctioned murder by lynch(以私刑处死) mobs, often horrifying spectacles(场面) of depravity. If cameras had been everywhere, as they are now, perhaps things would have been different. The shock of a beating or an extrajudicial(未按法律程序的) murder has proved to be far more intense when witnessed than when we read about it in the newspaper or hear of it on radio.
One great accomplishment of Martin Luther King and those who served with him in America’s civil rights revolution was to recognize the power of the new media: Americans could see the face of Rosa Parks on film, the bus boycotters, the murder of children in Sunday School, the brutal attack on the Selma marchers with fire hoses and attack dogs — peaceable demonstrators battered(被殴打) and beaten for seeking their constitutional rights in a vicious display of force that appalled(使……惊骇) the great mass of Americans. It was a morality play on film whose truth and effectiveness are beyond dispute, though it has many scenes still to be played.
以上就是前程百利小编为大家带来的托福阅读材料，平时的阅读练习是托福考试阅读备考的重要一环。希望大家利用好每份材料，尽可能多地从中获取知识。预祝大家托福考试取得好成绩。
