The film diminishes or erases the role people like James Forman and
Malcolm X played. Because they can’t erase Martin Luther King, Jr.,
they create a “white” washed image so we will never relate to him as a
man who came to see the struggle against oppression as an international
struggle. When he took a position against the war in Viet Nam, he drew
the anger of the government as well as members of his own organization,
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He was told to
stay in his place, as a non-violent civil rights worker. But he was
“increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor” which
demanded that he attack it as such.
As long as he remained a pacifist working for rights of “negroes,” he was no threat to the power structure.
-- Candy Gonzalez, "Selma, the Movie: 'White' Washing History" (Black Agenda Report).