Selma (2014 Film)
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50 free Selma (2014 Film) trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Selma tells the story of a few months in 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of ordinary people marched across Alabama to demand the right to vote. The 2014 film turned that campaign into a tense, human drama that drew wide critical acclaim. This quiz covers the film from every side: the actors and the real people they play, the scenes that stay with you, the long road the project took to the screen, and what happened when awards season arrived. A few questions step outside the film to the history it dramatizes. It works for film fans, for anyone who has just watched Selma in class or at home, and for teachers who want a ready-made set of questions with the answers explained.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The actors playing King, his wife, the president and the governor in Selma share which nationality?
British
British actors took all four parts. The lead had been attached since 2010, under an earlier director, four years before the cameras rolled.
Q 02Selma could not quote Martin Luther King Jr.'s real speeches because his estate licensed them to which filmmaker?
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg was to produce a King film for DreamWorks and Warner Bros., so Selma's director wrote new speeches that echo the originals, copying King's habit of saying a thing three ways.
Q 03Which talk-show host produced Selma and also plays Annie Lee Cooper, who punches a sheriff?
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey said she took the part because of Cooper's courage. The real Cooper had stood for hours at the courthouse trying to register before she struck the sheriff.
Q 04Which song from Selma won both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Original Song?
Glory
Glory beat songs from The Lego Movie and Begin Again to the Oscar, then added a Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media.
Q 05Which director of Selma became the first Black woman nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Director?
Ava DuVernay
Ava DuVernay took over the stalled project in 2013 and, by her own estimate, rewrote 90 percent of the script, yet a clause in the first writer's contract kept her name off the credit.
Q 06In Selma, state troopers attack marchers with clubs and tear gas on a bridge named for which man?
Edmund Pettus
Edmund Pettus was a Confederate general who went on to lead the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and campaigns to rename the bridge have followed.
Q 07Which singer-pianist co-wrote and performs Selma's Oscar-winning theme song with one of the film's own actors?
John Legend
John Legend appears on the Oscar under his birth name, John Stephens, having written the song with the rapper who plays James Bevel in the film.
Q 08In Selma, what does Martin Luther King Jr. do when troopers step aside on the second march?
Prays, then turns back
Prays, then turns back: the real King did the same on March 9, 1965, obeying a federal court order, and the day became known as Turnaround Tuesday.
Q 09The Oscar-winning song from Selma links the 1965 marches to 2014 protests in which American city?
Ferguson
Ferguson, Missouri, saw protests from August 2014 after a police officer shot a Black teenager, and the song arrived that December as a protest anthem.
Q 10Selma won the Oscar for its theme song but was nominated in only which other category?
Best Picture
Best Picture was its only other nomination. Its director and its star were both passed over, though each had been nominated at the Golden Globes.
Q 11Which actor plays Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, a role he first landed under another director in 2010?
David Oyelowo
David Oyelowo stayed with the project through four years of delays, and he had already worked with its eventual director on her 2012 film Middle of Nowhere.
Q 12Which actor plays President Lyndon B. Johnson, who first tells King his bill must wait, in Selma?
Tom Wilkinson
Tom Wilkinson's reluctant president drew the film's loudest criticism: a former Johnson aide said the real president had been King's willing partner on the bill.
Q 13Which actor, who holds up a diner in Pulp Fiction, plays Alabama governor George Wallace in Selma?
Tim Roth
Q 21Selma opens in 1964 with Martin Luther King Jr. accepting which honor, months before the marches begin?
Nobel Peace Prize
Nobel Peace Prize in hand, the film's King is soon at the White House asking for a federal law that would let Black citizens register without obstruction.
Q 22Early in Selma, four girls are killed by a Klan bomb at a church in which Southern city?
Birmingham
Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in September 1963, more than a year before the film's main story begins.
Q 23In Selma, Annie Lee Cooper knocks which lawman to the ground during a confrontation at the courthouse?
Jim Clark
Tim Roth's Wallace decides, with trooper chief Al Lingo, to meet a night march in Marion with force, the decision that leads to the film's first killing of a protester.
Q 14Which actress plays Coretta Scott King in Selma, having already played her in the 2001 film Boycott?
Carmen Ejogo
Carmen Ejogo met the real Coretta while preparing for Boycott and was given her blessing, thirteen years before playing her a second time.
Q 15Which rapper plays activist James Bevel in Selma and co-wrote the film's Oscar-winning song?
Common
Common shared the Oscar for the song, and the man he plays was the strategist who set the marches to Montgomery in motion after a young protester was killed.
Q 16Which future Succession star plays James Reeb, the Boston minister killed after the second march, in Selma?
Jeremy Strong
Jeremy Strong was four years from his breakthrough as Kendall Roy when he played Reeb, a white Unitarian minister fatally beaten by white men with clubs in the town.
Q 17Which actress, later a hero in Marvel films, plays organizer Diane Nash in Selma?
Tessa Thompson
Tessa Thompson went on to play Valkyrie in the Thor films. The real Diane Nash was married to James Bevel during the events the film shows.
Q 18Which Oscar-winning actor plays Fred Gray, the lawyer who asks a federal judge to allow the march, in Selma?
Cuba Gooding Jr.
Cuba Gooding Jr. plays the attorney who, a decade earlier, had defended Rosa Parks; in the film his plea to Judge Frank Johnson clears the way for the final march.
Q 19In Selma, which official played by Dylan Baker tells President Johnson that King is a problem?
J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover goes on to suggest breaking up King's marriage. The FBI's wiretaps on King had been approved by Robert Kennedy before Johnson took office.
Q 20In Selma, which leader visits Coretta Scott King and offers to help by seeming the more extreme alternative?
Malcolm X
Malcolm X really did speak in the town on February 4, 1965, telling Coretta he meant to show white America the alternative, and he was assassinated later that month.
Jim Clark was the Dallas County sheriff, and the real Cooper is said to have hit him after he jabbed her with his club as she waited in line to register.
Q 24In Selma, which gospel singer does Martin Luther King Jr. telephone so that she can sing to him?
Mahalia Jackson
Mahalia Jackson is played by the R&B singer Ledisi, who returned to the part in a 2022 biopic about the gospel star's life.
Q 25The first march in Selma, where troopers beat marchers in front of TV cameras, is remembered by which name?
Bloody Sunday
Bloody Sunday was March 7, 1965, and the televised beatings backfired on the state: hundreds of outsiders answered the call to come to the town for a second march.
Q 26Selma ends with Martin Luther King Jr. addressing the marchers from the steps of which Montgomery building?
Alabama State Capitol
Alabama State Capitol steps were the march's goal, and the real King spoke there on March 25, 1965, to a crowd of about 25,000 people.
Q 27In Selma, President Johnson tells King that his bill must wait because which priority comes first?
The War on Poverty
The War on Poverty is what the film's Johnson calls his next project; he says he understands King's concerns but asks him to wait.
Q 28Which Detroit mother, seen joining the marchers in Selma, was shot dead by Klansmen after the final march?
Viola Liuzzo
Viola Liuzzo was shot while driving activists between the two cities on the night the march ended, and one of the four men in the Klan car was an FBI informant.
Q 29In Selma, activists from which group, at work in the town before King arrived, resent his organization's methods?
SNCC
SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had run a voter registration drive in the town since 1963, well before King's group was invited in.
Q 30The real 1965 speech to Congress shown near the end of Selma is remembered for echoing which anthem's title?
We Shall Overcome
We Shall Overcome was the movement's own song, so a Southern president taking up its words before Congress, eight days after the bridge attack, was heard as an embrace of the cause.