Although "Selma," is currently getting major media coverage for being "Oscar snubbed" by the Motion Picture Academy, the film continues to draw criticism for playing fast and loose with the historical facts at its core.

D.T. Wright - son of the late Dallas County Sheriff's Deputy Doyle Wright, and a lifelong lawman himself - can now be added to the growing list of those who are troubled by the film's inaccuracies and want to set the record straight. Like President Lyndon B. Johnson's defenders, who've objected to depictions of LBJ as an adversary to King in the film, Wright objects to the way "Selma" depicts his father – who was at the center of the Annie Lee Cooper conflict – as well as the way people of Selma and neighboring towns are depicted as unanimously and unapologetically racist.

In a pivotal, visceral scene in the film, Sheriff James G. Clark viciously beats – blow after blow – a defenseless 55-year-old black woman, Cooper (played by Oprah Winfrey), with a nightstick. To amp up the drama and emotional impact, the film's director, Ava DuVernay, unfurls the scene in slow motion.

Despite the film's dramatic portrayal of the moment - and, now also because of it - there is still no clear picture of exactly what happened outside the Dallas County Courthouse on Jan. 25, 1965.

On that day King and hundreds of other Americans, black and white, watched as - depending on which accounts you believe - Cooper either caused the melee by punching Clark in the face, or she was attacked, unprovoked, by the sheriff, held down by two other deputies – including Doyle Wright – and hauled off to jail.

The well-respected New York Times, which covered the civil rights movement in great detail and had reporters on scene outside the courthouse, described the altercation much differently than it was portrayed in the film. Using the accepted vernacular of the day, the New York Times reported:

"A large Negro woman stepped out of the voter registration line today and punched Sheriff James G. Clark in the face," adding that Wright "lost some skin from the back of his neck and had a knot on his cheek."

In other words, according to the New York Times, Cooper was the instigator.

For his part, King, whom the Times said "was standing a few feet away" from the confrontation, remarked that Clark's actions were "absolutely uncalled for and absolutely unnecessary," the newspaper reported. "We have seen another day of brutality," he told another audience shortly thereafter, the Times further reported. "We still have in Dallas County a sheriff who is determined to trample over Negroes with iron feet of brutality and oppression."

The Washington Post, in a news story about Clark's death in 2007, reported that the sheriff "prodded Cooper in the neck with a billy club" before "[s]he turned around, decked him with all the strength in her 226-pound body and sent him sprawling." Clark, who according to the Post headline "embodied racist bigotry," blamed Cooper for starting the brawl. He told the Times, "She had stolen the club from one of my deputies, and all I was doing . . . was trying to get it out of her hand. But those damn newspaper fellows made it look like I was beating her."

According to Deputy Sheriff Wright's son, his father's statements and recollections, as well as many verified facts, do not line up with the movie's version of events.

"When he came home, he looked like he'd been hit by a truck," says D.T. Wright, who was 7 years old at the time and grew up in neighboring Selmont, Ala. "My sister said, 'Wow, what happened to you?' He said, 'Well, I tried to handcuff a black lady today, and she won.'

"I was afraid the cops there were just going to be seen [in the movie] as giving Annie Lee Cooper a beat down, but that didn't really happen."

As the younger Wright explains, "It wasn't the beat down that made Jim Clark look like an out-of-control racist idiot – which most people said he was and history might have correctly documented." But he says Cooper provoked the incident, as the New York Times reported, and photos that could easily be interpreted as Clark preparing to pummel Cooper actually depict a struggle between the sheriff and her for the billy club.

"Still, I guess the message (of 'Selma') is, there were some radicals on both sides of the issue, but us, as white people, and the white people we knew, and our father, the white deputy sheriff, we weren't the racist, bigoted, KKK members that it seemed everyone in the South was seen as [in the film] – knowing specifically that my dad didn't just pick somebody out of the crowd and start flailing on her because Jim Clark told him to.

"In the New York Times (photo), my dad is the guy on the left," Wright continues. "In the movie, somebody ran up and grabbed Annie Lee Cooper, and she said 'Get your hands off of me' and pulled away from that deputy, and then she was taken to the ground in that overdramatized slow-mo where her mouth is agape and she's screaming in anguish.

"I get it. It's a movie, and it never claimed that it was a blow-by-blow factual account or documentary about the event. But, overall, people were cast in ways that certainly isn't fair to our personal experiences and recollections."

Cooper stuck to her story until the end. In 2010, the year she died, she spoke to the Montgomery Advertiser about the altercation.

"I was just standing there when his deputies told a man with us to move, and when he didn't, they tried to kick him," Cooper told the Alabama newspaper. "That's when (Clark) and I got into it."

Paramount Pictures, the film's distributor, did not respond to HNGN's request for comment on this story.

There are other dubious moments in the film, Wright points out.

"The young man that Sheriff Clark pushed down in front of the courthouse (Jimmie Lee Jackson), for example, became the one that was shot and killed by a state trooper after the nighttime rally, and you'd think that happened in Selma; it actually didn't. It happened in Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles away," he explains. "So I think, again, some artistic liberties with the facts (were taken) and that's one of many.... That's not as big of deal as making the president an antagonist that didn't want to see the civil rights bill passed."

Indeed, the film's characterization of President Lyndon B. Johnson as an adversary to King, or at best a reluctant political accomplice to the civil rights giant, has been called into question. In a Dec. 26, 2014, Washington Post opinion piece, Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was President Johnson's top assistant for domestic affairs from 1965 to 1969, wrote that "the film falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself."

Califano went as far as writing, "In fact, Selma was LBJ's idea, he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted - and he didn't use the FBI to disparage him."

Another LBJ defender, the presidential historian, author of "Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency" and the director of the L.B.J. Presidential Library and Museum, Mark K. Updegrove, acknowledged in a Politico piece that "Selma" "gets much right" but "misses mightily in faithfully capturing the pivotal relationship - contentious, the film would have you believe - between King and President Lyndon Baines Johnson."

DuVernay, the director, responded via Twitter: "Bottom line is folks should interrogate history. Don't take my word for it or LBJ rep's word for it. Let it come alive for yourself."

The elder Wright can't reiterate his recollections because he passed away in 1988. His son says that as the years passed, it wasn't a subject his father brought up, and he didn't ask him about it again either.

"That's one of the things I regret most, not sitting down and saying, 'Dad, tell me all about the war, about you being wounded in the Philippines by a Japanese hand grenade. Tell me about the 'civil rights mess,' as it was typically referred to in the South," Wright shares.

Wright's father was an honorable man, insists his son, who followed his father's footsteps into the Army and into a career as a policeman. D.T. Wright served as a deputy sheriff in both Southern California and Indiana, and he worked as a policeman in Montgomery as well as in Clinton, Ind.

In the 2006 PBS documentary, "Eyes On The Prize," about the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Deputy Sheriff Wright can be heard telling activist Jimmy Webb, "We're trying to protect you," during a heated exchange between Webb and Chief Deputy Sheriff L.C. Crocker. (The exchange begins around the 36:30 mark in the video below.)

"When they integrated our schools, at least I know for a fact my sisters and I were like, 'What's the big deal?' We'd seen black kids our whole lives, what's the big deal that they're coming to our school?," Wright says. "Of course, on the other hand, there were what I call redneck white boys who felt they had to beat the black boys up every day. And I remember seeing hellacious fights. You'd ask them why did they do it, and they'd say, 'I don't want to go to school with any n-----.' You don't even know the guy. Is it really a big deal that the guy is darker than us?"

Wright says two things his father often told he and his sisters – Elaine is now 59, and Kathy is 60, and both asked that their last names not be used in this story – when the three siblings were growing up always stuck with him: "Good folks come in all colors," and "You're as good as everybody, but no better than anybody."

"Knowing D.T. Wright as I do, it's extremely apparent that his father raised him to be color blind in terms of race," says Luis Bolaños, a former law enforcement colleague of Wright and a renowned private investigator who consults for and can be seen on any number of network and cable true-crime programs. Bolaños met Wright when Bolaños joined the Riverside County, Calif., Sheriff's Department in 1984. "I also had the pleasure of having him as a fellow SWAT team member. He was a team leader and very well respected throughout the entire department community," says Bolaños.

To make the point further about Wright, Bolaños references the fact that late in his friend's law enforcement career, after he had left his position as Director of Law Enforcement Training Programs for the Train2Protect Network in Minneapolis to take a job as jail commander in Boone County, Ind., Wright was fired from the prison post for being a whistleblower.

Wright had witnessed a corrections officer throwing a punch at a black arrestee's head while the man's hands were handcuffed behind his back. Wright reported the incident – although he says race had nothing to do with his actions and he just wanted to do what was right. Wright would later successfully bring a tort claim against the county and be paid an $85,000 settlement.

"The steps D.T. took to protect this inmate, who happened to be African American, and discipline those responsible, were steps he learned from his upbringing by his father, and training he had received from law enforcement," Bolaños says. "D.T. was ultimately terminated for simply doing the right thing. Those in charge terminated D.T. because he would not 'cover up' the beating. Sometimes, those in charge abuse their powers to protect themselves at all costs. D.T. became a victim by doing what the justice system expected him or anyone else in the same situation to do. D.T. should be applauded for his actions and example he has set.

"I see clearly why D.T. wants to be sure his father is not vilified and labeled as just another one of those racist troopers in 'Selma.' It would be nice if someone from the film would take the time to contact D.T. and thank him for what he and his family have stood up for. It cost him his job. D.T. was vindicated when he sued his department for wrongful termination and won."

Wright says he and his wife discussed the merits of coming forward about the film's inaccuracies, saying, "My wife and I went through this: 'Do you really even want to talk about 'Selma'? Do we really care about Oprah and Annie Lee Cooper and the legends and what really happened? Does it really matter now that you're out of law enforcement and you won your case and right prevailed? Do we really want to get into this?'

But, says Wright, "Selma wasn't all a bunch of racist rednecks and the cops there weren't just out there beating the shit out of people with truncheons because they were black. That's really my message."

In making his claims, Wright states that "Selma" is in fact an important film, but it's easy to detect the hurt his voice over any suggestion that his father was someone other than the person he and others still hold in high esteem.

"Everybody that knew him would say [to me], 'You're Doyle Wright's boy.' I'd say, 'Yes sir,' and they would say, 'Doyle is a good man.' And that meant the world to me," he says.

No doubt there will be those who'll argue that Wright may be preoccupied with the details of one scene in an important 127-minute-long feature. But that scene is the emotional linchpin of the film, and Wright is, after all, a lawman, trained to believe that details matter.