Did Mississippi Burning really happen?
On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their bodies were discovered a few weeks later.
Here’s is the original New York Times story about the crime:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0621.html#article
If Hollywood gets its way, the civil rights movement was saved when Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe rolled into town like two gunslinging Western marshals. In this revisionist cinematic version of history, two FBI men bring truth and vigilante justice to the nasty Ku Klux Klan while a bunch of bewildered Negroes meekly stand by, shuffling and avoiding trouble.
The 1989 film Mississippi Burning was an emotional roller coaster. It was difficult to watch without being moved, breaking into a sweat, and finally cheering when the forces of good terrorized the redneck Klansmen into telling where the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers were buried. The movie gave audiences the feeling of seeing history unfold. But in the grand tradition of American filmmaking, this version of events had as much to do with reality as did D. W. Griffith’s racist “classic,” Birth of a Nation.
The movie opens with the backroads murder of three young civil rights activists in the summer of 1964. That much is true. Working to register black voters, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two whites from the North, and James Chaney, a black southerner, disappeared after leaving police custody in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In the film, two FBI agents arrive to investigate, but get nowhere as local rednecks stonewall the FBI and blacks are too fearful to act. The murderers are not exposed until Agent Anderson (Gene Hackman), a former southern sheriff who has joined the FBI, begins a campaign of illegal tactics to terrorize the locals into revealing where the bodies are buried and who is responsible.
It is a brilliantly made, plainly manipulative film that hits all the right emotional notes: white liberal guilt over the treatment of blacks; disgust at the white-trash racism of the locals; excitement at Hackman’s Rambo-style tactics; and, finally, vindication in the murderers’ convictions.
The problem is that besides the murders, few of the events depicted happened that way. Pressed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a large contingent of agents to Mississippi, but they learned nothing. The case was broken only when Klan informers were offered a $30,000 bribe and the bodies of the three men were found in a nearby dam site. Twenty-one men were named in the indictment, including the local police chief and his deputy. But local courts later dismissed the confessions of the two Klansmen as hearsay. The Justice Department persisted by bringing conspiracy charges against eighteen of the men. Tried before a judge who had once compared blacks to chimpanzees, seven of the accused were nonetheless convicted and sentenced to jail terms ranging from three to ten years.
Although J. Edgar Hoover put on a good public show of anti-Klan FBI work, it masked his real obsession at the time. To the director, protecting civil rights workers was a waste of his bureau’s time. Although the film depicts a black agent, the only blacks employed by the bureau during Hoover’s tenure as head were his chauffeurs. The FBI was far more interested in trying to prove that Martin Luther King was a Communist and that the civil rights movement was an organized Communist front. Part of this effort was the high-level attempt to eavesdrop on King’s private life, an effort that did prove that the civil rights leader had his share of white female admirers willing to contribute more than just money to the cause. Hoover’s hatred of King boiled over at one point when he called King “the most notorious liar” in the country. Another part of this effort involved sending King a threatening note suggesting he commit suicide.
This material is adapted from Don’t Know Much About History
