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Mississippi Burning: Airbrushing History
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16261 |
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THE ARTS
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3 / 1989 |
2,441 Words |
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Joshua Muravchik
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On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers--two white New Yorkers, one black Mississippian--disappeared in the environs of Philadelphia, Mississippi, after being released from the town's jail where they had been held for some hours on a false change of speeding. Within a day, their seasoned movement comrades knew that the three were not likely to be found alive. Neshoba Country, where Philadelphia was located, was so hostile to civil rights, so infested with Ku Klux Klan, that movement workers regarded it as especially hazardous, even in comparison to such nearby places as Meridian, none too friendly by any other standard.
Two days later, the car in which the three had been traveling was found in a bog, completely incinerated. Weeks passed, and there was no trace of the three. More than a hundred federal agents dragged the bogs and rivers, civil rights activists demanded that Washington act more energetically, and local officials insisted smugly that the entire episode was a hoax designed by the movement to publicize its cause. Finally, forty-four days after their disappearance, the bodies of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were found bulldozed into an earthen dam to which federal officials had been directed by a paid informer. Each of the three had been shot; Chaney may have been beaten first. Eventually, indictments were returned against eighteen Klansmen, and seven, including the imperial wizard of the White Knights of the KKK and the deputy sheriff who had jailed the three, were convicted.
'Death Sentence'
When the story came out, the murders turned out to have been no momentary act, but the execution of a standing "death sentence" issued by the Klan against Schwerner. A bearded, Jewish-born leftist and a gifted community organizer, Schwerner in a few months of work had managed to make his presence felt in Meridian. To the Klan, he epitomized the northern "invasion" come to disrupt its way of life.
The case was one of the landmarks in the civil rights movement's painful march to victory. It came just months after the passage of the historic civil rights act of 1964 and spurred the adoption of the 1965 voting rights act. And it marked an advance in the federal government's willingness to extend its arm in protection over civil rights workers in the South, despite the protests of "states' rights."
Now, director Alan Parker and screenwriter Chris Gerolmo have used the case as the basis for Mississippi Burning, a film named after the FBI's code name for its Philadelphia investigation. "Burning" also is Parker's symbol for the rampage of redneck violence that swept Mississippi in response to the movement. Mississippi Burning shows its share of beatings, hangings, and shootings, but it is the recurrent scenes of churches, homes, and farms put to the torch by nightriders that constitute the film's signature.
These were scenes of high drama, and Parker has fashioned them into a movie of great power. It is alternately magnetic in its depiction of terrible deeds, a depiction that is graphic but alas hardly exaggerated. Verisimilitude, however, is not the same thing as truth, and Parker acknowledges that rather than recreate the facts of the case, he has used its main outlines as a scaffold for a fictional
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