David Oyelowo wears a Rolex Datejust

Shortly after Selma opens, Martin Luther King Jr. sits across the Resolute desk from President Lyndon Johnson, pressing him to act on voting rights. As King works his hands to drive the point home, a solid gold Rolex Datejust slips out from his cuff. Across the desk, Tom Wilkinson's Johnson wears a solid gold Rolex Day-Date, the President model the real LBJ favored. Two gold Rolexes in one Oval Office, both historically accurate.

Ava DuVernay puts a Datejust reference 1601 on David Oyelowo's wrist for the length of the film: solid gold case, light champagne dial, matching gold Jubilee bracelet. It is the watch the real King wore. He appears in countless photographs with it, his everyday choice, and he was reportedly given it around 1964, the year he became the youngest person then awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, at thirty-five, though that gift is hard to confirm.

The Datejust keeps surfacing. In a quiet scene at home that the New York Times later broke down in its Anatomy of a Scene series, King searches his own kitchen cabinets for trash bags, unfamiliar with a house he is rarely in, and the gold catches the low light as Coretta Scott King, played by Carmen Ejogo, hands him a bag. Selma compresses the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery and the fight for the Voting Rights Act into about two and a half hours, and across all of it the Rolex stays on the wrist.