In 1966, Martin Luther King visited Philadelphia, Mississippi, seat of Neshoba County and the town where three young civil rights workers disappeared two years before. Leading a procession of 300 people, he was confronted by a mob of angry white men brandishing hoes, broomsticks, and ax handles. One even turned a hose on King's group, which fought their way to the courthouse.
There King confronted the deputy sheriff, Ray Price, who he knew had arrested the civil rights workers on the night they disappeared. He turned and told the crowd that there were people among them who had participated in the murder. "You're damn right," Price muttered. "They're right behind you."
King was moved to write later: "This is a terrible town. The worst I've seen. There is a complete reign of terror here."
"Mississippi Burning" aims to give a taste for how bad it was, and just how superhuman the efforts to stop it had to be in order to succeed. It's flawed because it's not terribly functional as a crime drama or nuanced enough as a civil rights story, but its heart is in the right place, its grasp of the situation solid, and its detractors mostly attack it for all the wrong reasons.
Like why does "Mississippi Burning" give all the credit to breaking the murder case to the FBI? Didn't director Alan Parker and writer Chris Gerolmo know FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was a racist? Yes, and he hated vigilante groups with a passion, particularly the Ku Klux Klan. Plus he was acting under orders of President Johnson, who was very disturbed about the disappearances, enough to place a phone call to a Mississippi senator asking for help finding the kids (and being told by the senator it was all probably just a hoax). WhiteHouseTapes.org has the phone calls on record, while Doug Linder's Famous Trials website has the full story. The FBI did send hundreds of agents to Neshoba County, they rankled the local authorities big time, they found the murdered workers, and they arrested several people for the crime, including the sheriff and the deputy sheriff, getting relatively light convictions for most, but convictions all the same, a first involving the murder of a black by whites.
Did the black population of Neshoba County contribute much to solving the case? I don't know, but King's experience there is telling. There simply was no regard for the rights of non-whites. Blacks were completely powerless there, dealing with a white power structure that was nakedly aggressive about keeping them down. In many Southern jurisdictions, white authorities looked the other way when the Klan did their work. As the FBI investigation in Neshoba County revealed, the sheriff's office and the Klan worked hand in glove.
"Mississippi Burning" has great acting, sumptuous period detail, an unflinching desire to show the terrible toll of racism on a society, not only with lynchings but most powerfully, in the story Gene Hackman tells about how his father dealt with a black neighbor's mule. Just the way he uses his eyes as he tells the story, without the slightest attempt at drama, draws you into the terrible dehumanization that racism brings not to its targets but those who buy into it.
The truth of the story was more shaded than Parker presents here. He's not a racist, or an FBI apologist. He's a filmmaker who wants to entertain his audience. He unrealistically overamps the Klan violence, to the point where they seem to be burning some black person's building once a week even though the FBI is making little progress through most of the movie. There's an early scene where Willem Dafoe's character (based not on an FBI agent but a Justice Department official named John Michael Doar) sits down next to a black man and starts asking him questions about the murder, in full view of a hundred or so people. No criminal investigator works like that, especially in the FBI.
The story of the Mississippi Burning case is so compelling, why fictionalize it at all? The liberties they take, with the exception of the deputy sheriff and his wife, don't really help the plot out much. There's an attempt to make Hackman and Dafoe into fractious partners, but the scenes are ridiculous, especially when Dafoe pulls a gun on his partner after teasing him about his relationship with the deputy's wife.
Frankly, the most interesting place this case was fought was in the courtroom, but we see little of that, or of Judge Cox, the bigoted federal justice who passed down the final sentences after heavy prodding from Washington.
The movie does go for fireworks more often than it should. Hackman's two big confrontation scenes with the bad guys, at the speakeasy and in the barber shop, serve no apparent criminal investigation purpose and are meant to just make the audience feel good. He doesn't even get a word out of the deputy (played excellently by Brad Dourif) in between punches. But damn it works like hell.
After the case was successfully prosecuted, Martin Luther King was moved to say the following: "I must commend the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the work they have done in uncovering the perpetrators of this dastardly act. It renews my faith in democracy."
Manipulated or not, I feel the same way after watching "Mississippi Burning."
