
          A Movie with Eyes on the Wrong Prize: "Mississippi
Burning"
          By Bond, JulianJulian Bond
          Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 22-23
          
          The new movie "Mississippi Burning" is the worst example of the
genre called docudrama: there is no documentation and very little
drama. Instead, filmgoers see "Rambo Meets the Ku Klux Klan" as
cardboard characters parade through a small Mississippi town in
1964.
          The filmmakers are quick to let the audience know their effort is a
dramatization, based on the FBI investigation into the disappearance
and deaths of Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney
outside Philadelphia, Miss., in June 1964.
          But the picture of the FBI, the civil_rights movement, and white
Southerners which emerges places "Mississippi Burning" as close to
Freedom Summer as Lillian_Smith's 
Strange Fruit is to a basket of avocados.
          No one emerges whole from this film.
          The FBI, which hardly endeared itself to movement activists, is
shown committing crimes beyond the imagination of its worse
critics.
          The civil_rights workers--look-a-likes for Schwerner, Goodman, and
Chaney--appear only long enough to be murdered in the first five
minutes. The rest of the film is given over to cardboard caricatures
of dark-suited, buttoned-up federal agents and loutish Klansmen,
punctuated with enough burnings, beatings, and bombings to have
destroyed a town of Philadelphia's size.
          The Klan members are ignorant lumps and the FBI agents slow-witted,
if well-meaning, fools. The former confound the latter by dumping a
black beating victim from a speeding car in the town square at high
noon.
          When regular police techniques and massive searches fail to dent
the wall of white silence erected by the trio's murders, the FBI
resorts to two kidnappings, a faked lynching, a clumsy seduction,
and--most incredible of all--a threatened castration of the town's
kidnapped mayor by a black FBI agent. There were, of course, no black
FBI agents in 1964. In truth, the FBI bought information about the
murders for $30,000 from an informant.
          Mississippi was at war in 1964. The one thousand mostly white
summer volunteers who joined the permanent staffs of SNCC, CORE, and
SCLC in voter_registration and Freedom Schools across the state poised
a real challenge to the white supremacists, who responded with arson
and murder. Eighty civil_rights workers were assaulted; over a
thousand were jailed. Several unidentified black bodies were found in
the search for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney; one was wearing a CORE
tee-shirt.
          The FBI was stiff-necked and most often allied with local
lawmen. The agents did announce their presence through their uniformed
suits and shoes and their Northern ways and seemed more interested in
watching the law being broken than seeing it enforced. Their
investigations centered on political thought, not the denial of civil
rights.
          But "Mississippi Burning" takes that frightening summer and makes
it surreal and unbelievable.
          And it invites the movie audience to believe that the FBI cared
enough about the missing trio to use the Klan's tactics against the
Klan, and that the summer's heroes were dressed in blue serge, not
blue jeans.
          The true lesson of Freedom Summer is told in the stories of the
volunteers and the young, full-time civil_rights professionals and the
nameless Mississippians who housed and sheltered them, took beatings
and blows for them. Nearly all the volunteers were white, and nearly
all their hosts were black, but some few white Mississippians stood
up, too. "Mississippi Burning" cheapens them all. Instead of
dramatizing the real heroics of a critical time in American history,
it is a made-up story with made-up people about a time and place which
never existed.
          There are those who argue that movies like "Mississippi Burning,"
as awful as they are, are preferable in an age in which most Americans
absorb history from small and large screens.
          That is precisely this movie's main affront.
          It enters a popular culture where 1964 is as remote as 1776 and
where lessons are learned from flickering film instead of the fumed
page or the award-winning documentary. It becomes the history it
parodies; a friend's date told me excitedly, "Billy says these things
really happened back then."
          She is thirty-five.
          One of "Mississippi Burning's" stars is already being touted for an
Oscar nomination; the FBI agent he portrays is a former Mississippi
sheriff, a good-old-boy with a red-blooded American heart. His desire
to catch the killers overrides his respect for the law. The makers of
Mississippi Burning" let their desire for a big box office and Oscars
overcome respect for history. They had their eyes on the wrong
prize. 
          
            Julian Bond, currently visiting professor in history and
politics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Penn., is a member of
the Southern_Regional_Council.
          
        
