Mississippi Burning Is Still Burning: A Critical Film Review

Reading by Judy Richardson

The African Americans I worked with were courageous, often putting their lives on the line to effect change.

In my home, we rarely talked about racism. My mother was a proud woman who, mistakenly, believed that she could protect her children from absorbing the restrictions of discrimination by simply not discussing them. There were, however, a few exceptions. Her remembrance of Birth of a Nation was one of these. Even years later — as she told me about the intense shame she felt after seeing the film — the rage was still present.

The film depicts the Klan as the saviors of white womanhood against the ravages of the Black male during Reconstruction. President Woodrow Wilson premiered it at the White House. Interestingly, because of its advanced techniques, the film is often used in film classes as a teaching tool, often without acknowledging its white supremacist theme. However, my mother did not notice these new techniques. She remembered only that she and a friend left the theater — with its primarily white audience — as quickly as possible and with their eyes averted. The year was 1915.

[Note: A powerful 2017 PBS documentary, Birth of a Movement, portrays the campaign, mounted at the time by William Monroe Trotter and others in the NAACP, to protest screenings of the film. It documents both the anger and the prescience of the African American community as they organized these protests. They understood the power of the film to expand and solidify the concept of white supremacy nationwide.]   

Thereafter followed years of movie stereotypes: the Black male as stupid and lazy, a la Stepin Fetchit, and the Black female as fawning maid and white mother figure, a la Hattie McDaniel. Now, seventy-five years after Birth of a Nation, Hollywood has become more sophisticated. Certainly, we are still bombarded by images of Black male muggers and Black female prostitutes. But we are now also subjected to a different kind of racism. The studios have discovered the box office potential of human rights movement-related themes. But that poses a problem: what to do with the Black characters who led and continue to lead these movements? The answer: put them so far in the background that they will not disrupt a white audience’s assumed comfort level. We have films like Cry Freedom and A World Apart, both about South Africa’s Black-led anti-apartheid movement, but both focused on the trials and tribulations of white protagonists.

This denial of the role of Blacks in their own struggle reaches new heights in Mississippi Burning. Based on the murder of three civil rights workers — James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman — during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, the film, with incredible double-jointedness, manages to almost totally ignore the movement that was at the core of the event, thus ignoring the incredible heroism of local African American communities throughout Mississippi. At the same time, it lifts the FBI to heroic proportions. As a staff worker with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the early 1960s, I was based in Greenwood, Mississippi, when we moved our national office there for the summer. Having experienced the event supposedly portrayed, I found the film to be not only insulting, but also a gross distortion of history.

The film characterizes African Americans in Mississippi as passive victims of racist violence who simply cower or kneel in prayer whenever they are attacked. For example, the film depicts an evening gathering at an African American church. As the participants leave the church, they are brutally beaten by Klansmen. With much good sense, everyone tries to escape. Everyone, that is, except the young Black youth who has been set up in the film as the strongest Black male image, even above his father. The youth exits the church and, with no Klansmen in evidence, does not run, but kneels in prayer. He is quickly found by a Klansman and clubbed into unconsciousness, as he continues to pray.

Since the filmmakers are intent upon disregarding the Movement, the reason for the attack is not explained. No mention is made at the church meeting of voter registration activity. The viewer could easily assume that Black Mississippians were routinely attacked in 1964 simply for going to church. The deliberate omission of Mississippi’s powerful voter registration campaign not only distorts history, it lessens the dramatic impact of the scene, which should have been the primary concern of the filmmakers.

Alan Parker, the film’s director, has been widely quoted as saying, “The two heroes had to be white. That is a reflection of our society, as much as of the film industry. At this point in time, it could not have been made any other way.” That quote is based on two false assumptions: first, that Hollywood should continue to play to the lowest common denominator of the broad American viewing audience. Certainly, racism will keep some white filmgoers away from a film with Black leads. But many other whites — and viewers of other ethnic groups (whom Mr. Parker seems to have totally dismissed) — will still buy those tickets if the story is dramatically engaging.

Second, Parker’s quote assumes that films can only reflect the racism of our society — not combat it — which then perpetuates it. Mr. Parker reminds me of the southern restaurant owner of the early 1960s who professed that he, personally, did not oppose desegregating his lunch counter, but, alas, his customers just weren’t ready for it.

Though the lack of African Americans in leading roles in this story is ahistorical, the stereotypical portrayals of those included are even worse. As Barbara Reynolds, an African American columnist for USA Today notes, “In Mississippi Burning, Blacks mostly pray, hide and sing, which could cause generations of young people to think Blacks were hiding or sleeping under a magnolia bush while human rights battles roared around them.”

The African Americans I worked with in the Southern civil rights movement were courageous, often putting their lives on the line to effect change. As opposed to the cowering images of Blacks presented in this film, I am reminded of the Fannie Lou Hamers, the Amzie Moores, the Johnson and the Hudson families, and countless other local African American families in Mississippi who offered leadership and protection when it was they, not the civil rights staff workers, who had the most to lose. They guided and grounded us. They were, in fact, the bulwark of that movement.

Yet, in Mississippi Burning, African Americans are pictured as mumbling cowards, with heads down, afraid to talk to anyone about the disappearance of the three missing civil rights workers. In fact, in his book The River of No Return, (Morrow, 1973) Cleve Sellers, a SNCC staff worker in Mississippi, tells a very different story. He describes travelling with two carloads of civil rights workers into Neshoba County right after they learned that Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were missing. Sellers recalls his experiences with the Jones family (given a fictitious name for their protection), who housed Movement workers. Mr. Jones was one of the local African American leaders involved in voter registration work in the county:

Mr. Jones, who lived with his wife, son and two daughters, was expecting us. His wife had prepared a big meal of greens, cornbread, buttermilk, candied yams, and ham hocks. While they ate, they told us what they knew about the church-burning and the missing men. . .

“Y’all welcome to stay here and search as long as you want, though. We got everything set up for you.”

Mr. Jones told us that he had organized a twenty-four hour guard for the house.

“I’ll be sitting on the front porch with my shotgun every night and there’ll be a man in the barn behind the house with a rifle.”

But the Jones family was not alone in their bravery:

The assistance we received from a group of Black sharecroppers who lived in and around Philadelphia was crucial. Each day these men would leave home. . . they would spread out across the countryside searching for places where the three missing bodies might be buried. These men were native Mississippians who had no illusions about the perilous nature of their task. They knew that they were risking their lives and the lives of their wives and children by helping us.

“We gotta do it,” one of the men told me one afternoon. “Somehow, it might make things better for the young kids. It’s already too late for us old folks.”

These are hardly the frightened “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies” image perpetuated in this film, as it was in Gone With the Wind. These were people who consistently stood strong, long before the cameras arrived with the white volunteers of Freedom Summer… and long after they left.

In the midst of the opposition from Movement activists and others that greeted Mississippi Burning, I was asked to debate one of the executive producers of the film at the Harvard Law School. After I listed my complaints about the ahistorical characterization of both the FBI and Movement activists, the producer turned toward me and, smiling in a conspiratorial way, said: “Look, you’re a filmmaker. You understand dramatic license.” I responded, “Yes, I do. But what you’ve done is similar to making a film about France during World War II and making the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis, the heroes; and making the fighters of the French Underground, which lost their lives fighting the Nazis, ineffectual cowards. You don’t get to have that kind of ‘dramatic license’.”

During the 1980s, I was director of information for the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice in New York City. One of our projects was focused on the children of the many homeless families who were warehoused in New York City’s welfare hotels. I saw the pride these children felt when they watched Eyes on the Prize, with its powerful images of Black leadership and courage — from unsung heroines and heroes like Unita Blackwell, to more famous leaders like Martin Luther King. When you’re surrounded by images of powerlessness and degradation, it is essential, particularly when you’re young, to know that other realities exist.

Certainly as we made the first six-hour series of Eyes on the Prize, we were ever mindful of the need to show the documented courage that existed at every level of our community, both African American and white. This is why Mississippi Burning enraged me so. They robbed all of us — but particularly the African American community — of one of our greatest moments of unity and strength. And if you don’t know you did it before, you won’t know that you can do it again.

But there is another reason why Mississippi Burning should be denounced. The film not only emasculates the power of the Black community, it also depicts the FBI as the cavalry, out-Ramboing Rambo. In reality, FBI agents were famous in the movement for only taking notes, even while they witnessed brutal beatings in clear violation of federal statutes. We also knew that when you contacted the FBI, you were very likely also informing the local Klan chapters. Many of the FBI’s southern agents were culled from the current crop of racist local white sheriffs (at least the film was correct about this), who ran their counties like minor fiefdoms.

Bob Moses, then director of SNCC’s Mississippi project, noted that Herbert Lee, the local NAACP head with whom Moses had been working on voter registration, was killed by E. H.  Hurst, a white Mississippi state legislator. The incident occurred in Amite County in 1961. Louis Allen, an African American resident of the county, who witnessed the murder, at first gave false evidence out of well-grounded fear. He later told Moses he would now tell the truth at a formal hearing, but only if he could be guaranteed protection by the federal government. Moses urged the Justice Department to protect Allen, but, according to Moses, was told that “there was no way possible to provide protection for a witness at such a hearing and that probably, in any case, it didn’t matter what he testified because the legislator would be found innocent.” Shortly thereafter, a deputy sheriff broke Allen’s jaw with a flashlight because, said Allen, the FBI had told the sheriff of Allen’s decision to tell the truth about the killing. On January 31, 1964, the night before he was to move to Chicago for his protection, Louis Allen was shot dead as he entered his home. His killer was never brought to justice.

One of my SNCC staff responsibilities – both in the National Office in Atlanta and in Greenwood, Miss. during 1964 Freedom Summer — was to be an operator for the Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) line, the 800-like phone line that kept us in twenty-four hour contact with our many movement field offices throughout the South. When I called the local FBI offices in Memphis or New Orleans (and later Jackson) to report white supremacist violence against voter registration workers in Mississippi, I was met with either disinterest or outright hostility. (In fact, until Freedom Summer in 1964, Mississippi’s powerful U.S. Senators had been able to block the location of any FBI office in Mississippi.) Also, the FBI at the time was directed by J. Edgar Hoover, a man who thought all civil rights activity was a communist conspiracy, a man who did his best to destroy — not protect — the movement. And his agents openly reflected that attitude.

We cannot, as filmmakers, make heroes out of anti-heroes and expect to get away with it. Brent Staples, an African American editor with The New York Times, noted: “The weight of Mississippi Burning’s distortions crushes truth under foot. . . This story was savaged; it seems, in service of a clearly reactionary and outmoded idea: that white Americans would shudder at the idea of heroes not cast in their images.”

[Note: More recently, I was a visiting professor at Brown University and among the Movement-related films I showed my students were Freedom Song and Mississippi Burning. Freedom Song is a beautifully rendered Hollywood feature, with a star-studded cast that includes Danny Glover and Loretta Devine. Strongly grounded in actual events, it is based on SNCC’s first voter registration campaign in McComb, Mississippi, in 1961. It depicts the strong organizing efforts of returning African American World War II veterans, focused on voting rights and economic development. It is they who grounded (and protected) the SNCC staffers. The film also highlights the leadership role of young people. Yet, when I showed both films, some students preferred Mississippi Burning because, as one student noted, it was faster-paced and the violence was more graphic. An interesting discussion then took place.]

As we know, Mississippi Burning continues to be viewed. Unfortunately, like Birth of a Nation, it is the gift that keeps on giving. However, thanks to Freedom Song and Birth of a Movement, we now have powerful and historically accurate alternatives to the earlier, racist films. We simply have to use them.