Perhaps it is, but that's not what the outraged people are saying. They are claiming that LBJ is being portrayed as the antagonist, which he is not.Thanas wrote:That is a very unfair shake to LBJ. I can see how people would be outraged about that. It turns him from probably the most important force in politics (yes, more important than MLK) for civil rights to an opportunist or somebody who needed a push to do the right thing.
As a side note, the movie didn't portray King as any less of an opportunist. In it, one of the main reasons King picks Selma as the epicenter of the voting rights protests is because he knows that the sheriff is a near uncontrollable thug and that it would be trivial to provoke him into committing an atrocity that would rally the rest of the country to his side. It even implies that he cancelled one protest at the last second when it looked like he wasn't going to get that reaction (there was a sizeable contingent of white clergy that joined in the protest, and the sheriff was on a tight leash after he openly attacked a previous protest in broad daylight in front of the national press).
EDIT: Also wanted to add that even if it showed Johnson as an opportunist, it still showed him as an ally. When he met with King at the beginning, he tried to have King support him in his push for the War on Poverty because he felt that ending poverty would help more.