“Here’s the thing, my sister. If you look the civil rights movement, white people died in Mississippi, Alabama, Kent State during the Vietnam protests,” Spike Lee told The Root’s Danielle Young, when asked about how he chose a lot of non-black people protesting in his new film BlacKkKlansman, which arrives in theaters on Friday.
“White people have died for justice. So it was not a matter of saying, ‘I can’t put Heather Heyer at the end of the film because she’s not black.”
He continued:
“First of all, she was out there protesting those motherfuckers. If you look at Charlottesville footage, those were not all black people protesting, those were good white people who we have alliances with. I didn’t tell those people in the film to scream and yell, ‘Black Lives Matter!’ They were doing it on their own. So I have no problem. Right is right and Heather Heyer is a martyr. She gave her life for justice.”
One of Hollywood’s best directors, Lee also admitted that he had never heard of the story of Ron Stallworth, a black man who joined the Klu Klux Klan in the 1970s, prior to Jordan Peele, who introduced Spike to Stallworth’s story.
