Andre Holland has joined the cast of Ava DuVernay’s upcoming MLK drama Selma, to play politician Andrew Young, who served was Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and was a supporter and friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a strategist and negotiator during the Civil Rights Campaigns that resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. He was also with King in Memphis, Tennessee, when King was assassinated in 1968.
And also Tessa Thompson has been cast as Diane Nash, a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960, who also played a key role in bringing King to Montgomery, AL, in support of the Freedom Riders. She was sentenced to two years in prison for teaching nonviolent tactics to children in Jackson, MS, although she was four months pregnant. She was later released on appeal. Nash also played a major role in the Birmingham de-segregation campaign of 1963 and the Selma Voting Rights Campaign of 1965.
Both Holland and Thompson join David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr., Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King, Tom Wilkinson as President Lyndon B. Johnson, Ledisi as Mahalia Jackson, Keith Stanfield as Jimmie Lee Jackson and Henry G. Sanders playing Cager Lee, Jimmie Lee Jackson’s grandfather, in a film produced by Oprah Winfrey, Brad Pitt’s Plan B and Christian Colson (who won an Oscar for producing Slumdog Millionaire).
Paramount Pictures is also on board the Pathe UK-backed project, which centers on the 1965 landmark voting rights campaign regarded as the peak of the civil rights movement.
