Depiction of African American Southerners
Unita Blackwell, born in Mississippi in 1933
Throughout the movie Mississippi Burning, African American southerners are depicted as a hopeful people. Although they are physically attacked, and their homes and churches burned down; they remain hopeful and optimistic. There are numerous scenes throughout the film in which they are treated ruthlessly and unfairly. However, the film takes place in a segregated county in Mississippi in 1964. Nevertheless, one must consider the complete setting of the film. Throughout the film, there are numerous scenes in which African Americans are seen in inferior roles; primarily due to a set of laws referred to as Jim Crow laws. An article written by Ronald L. F. Davis, Ph. D. documents the transition from Jim Crow to the civil rights era:
The new militancy of black Americans in the post war era ushered in the transition from segregation to civil rights. The NAACP had supported numerous legal battles from the 1920s forward--usually local litigation and investigations of lynching, challenging the unequal facilities of state institutions and laying down thereby a body of legal precedent used by the courts in the 1950s. In 1944, the Supreme Court struck down the white primary, a measure used to exclude blacks from the Democratic Party primaries in the South. The number of southern, African Americans registered to vote rose from 150,000 in 1940 to more than a million by 1952.
The transition was complete when the NAACP lawyers convinced the Supreme Court to reverse the doctrine of "separate but equal" in education. Other court cases followed, along with ground-breaking federal legislation, and waves of protests by black and white activists determined to implement the Court's rulings and to end segregation and disfranchisement. This activism became known as the Civil Rights Movement, and the era is frequently called the "Second Reconstruction" because it effectively completed the Civil Rights revolution begun by Congress and embodied in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments passed in the decade after the Civil War.
This incredibly successful challenge to Jim Crow coincided with the de-colonization of non-white nations throughout the world. It was no accident that the great African-American leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, Martin Luther King Jr., drew his greatest inspiration from the non-violent tactics espoused by Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of India's independence from Great Britain.
With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, legalized segregation and the disfranchisement of African Americans was finally ended. It had taken almost one hundred years of resistance to terror and discrimination to achieve what had been promised to African Americans at the end of the Civil War. The struggle from terror to triumph had not been an easy victory, but it was a war valiantly fought--and it was a war in which justice ultimately prevailed.
In fact, so dead is the historical meaning of the word Jim Crow that the average college student today is unaware of its significance. According to a survey of students in American history classes at a major university, less than 20 percent recognized the word at all. And most of them have only a vague notion that the word once had something to do with segregation.
Yet, if Jim Crow is legally buried, the belief in white superiority and the legacy of segregation and racial discrimination still lives on in the hearts, minds, and actions of many Americans. The recurrent outbreaks of race riots in American cities are telling reminders that voting rights and integration of public schools represent only part of the solution to the problem of race in America. Indeed, the lack of equal access by African Americans to adequate and rewarding jobs, quality education, and affordable housing strongly suggests to many observers that the spirit of Jim Crow still haunts the social and economic landscape of the American nation.
A proper depiction of the African American community and the brutality of some Caucasians can be seen 51 minutes into the film during the church scene and the scenes briefly following.
Unita Blackwell, a woman born in segregated Mississippi during the Jim Crow era, provides a first-hand account of the treatment of African Americans. Blackwell, born in the 1930s, overcame adversary to become a civil rights leader and eventually the very first African American woman elected mayor in the state of Mississippi.
Depiction of Caucasian Southerners (including local law enforcement)
Throughout the film, the majority of Caucasian southerners are depicted as racist, evil individuals who want to assure their dominance over the African American community. Their motive in the film was to scare and threaten the African American community, and discourage them from talking to FBI agents. These terrorist, the majority of whom are clansmen, truly are depicted in the most negative light possible. However, in a scene from the film in which Agent Anderson is speaking to Deputy’s wife, she states that everyone has these extremely negative views of the south. Nevertheless, she brings up a very interesting point; that from a very young age these individuals were taught all of these racist and bigoted ways of thinking. She continues to state that once you hear something enough time you start to believe it. Nevertheless, the cruel acts portrayed in the film are historically accurate. Lynching is examined more closely in the following article entitled, “The Civil Rights Era and the Klan: Lynching, or Just Plain Murder?”.
In 1955, an African-American teenager from Chicago was murdered while visiting family in Money, Mississippi , a town with a population of 55. Emmett Till's "capital" offense: trying to flirt with a store owner's European-American wife.
Till had acted on a dare from his cousins and their friends, but four days later he was dead. After his beaten, unclothed body was found in the Tallahatchie River , two men were charged with his murder: Roy Bryant, husband of the store clerk, and Bryant's half brother. It was unusual that the men were even prosecuted in court but, in 1950s Mississippi , their acquittal was a done deal. Emmett Till's murder closely followed the 1954 school desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. Till was furtively murdered by only two men for reasons that were not political, but it was Till's death and the national publicity it received that galvanized both violent white racists and the Civil Rights movement.
This time around, white racists, whether Klan members or not, were on the defensive. Once again the "Klan" was a secret society—in reality, a composite of local groups with only a loose affiliation across the South. Klans created a deadly synergy with "White Citizens Councils" that sprang up to resist integration after Brown. The Citizens Councils supplied the rhetoric and applied political and economic pressure in preference to openly advocating violence, but local Klans stood ready at hand to carry out assaults, bombings, and assassinations.
As in the case of the second KKK, "respectable" European Americans began to dissociate themselves from the Klans once they realized that the federal government had tardily become serious about prosecuting civil rights crimes. At this time, many local Klans consolidated as the anti-black terrorist group "United Klans of America"—with the notorious Robert Shelton as their Imperial Wizard. But in 1979, 13 of Shelton 's Klansmen were sentenced to federal prison for perpetrating violence in Talladega County, Alabama. The death blow to the UKA came after they lynched a randomly chosen African-American teenager, Michael Donald, in 1981. The UKA was ruined financially when Donald's family sued for damages and in 1987 received ownership of the UKA's 6.5 acre national headquarters in Tuscaloosa . Several Klansmen were convicted of Donald's murder. One—in an unprecedented example—was actually executed.
A proper depiction of the mentality of Caucasians southerners can be seen 28 minutes into the film during a barbershop scene.
Brief history of lynchings and the KKK
Depiction of FBI agents
Gene Hackman - character loosely based
on John Proctor
Throughout the film, the FBI agents are seen as two individuals determined to solve the murder of the three civil rights activist. They are constantly challenging local law enforcement and clansmen in their ongoing pursuit of the truth. Furthermore, they are seen as heroes that will stop at nothing to bring justice to the state of Mississippi. There is one scene in the film in which the two agents are in a hotel room and a rock is thrown threw their window. The two men run to the window to see a burning cross just outside their door. Instead of being intimated by the threat of the KKK, they ask for the FBI to send more agents. However, this is not historically accurate, most notably the FBI agent played by Gene Hackman; which is loosely based on John Proctor. Although the agents did face adversity in attempting to solve the murder case of the three civil rights workers, they were not necessarily the heroes they were made out to be in the film. The agents also realized that the true heroes were the civil rights workers in the south who literally risked their lives for the equality of others. This is clearly evident in an interview conducted in 1989 in which John Proctor stated, “I'm not a hero […] I did my job”.
