It’s also a town, where-just blocks away from the Capitol building-you can find tattered second-hand clothing stores, one which displayed the hand-written advertisement, “We stretch shoes to fit your feet-come see!”Ī branch of the local library here is named after Eudora Welty and the city offers a thriving rhythm & blues scene operating out of joints like Lueberta’s Bar-B-Que & Catfish Restaurant and Lounge. Jackson, the state capital, boasts tall office skyscrapers and an ornate, white-columned governor’s mansion illuminated by floodlights which shine late into the night. Yet they eagerly recruited “Mississippi Burning,” hoping the film would dramatize the vast gulf between the state’s Yuppie-style administration and its era of ‘60s strife.īut even today’s Mississippi offers many confusing images-some refreshingly positive, others depressingly archaic. Ray Mabus, prefer to emphasize the state’s progress since its days as a backwater haven of bigotry.
Mississippi’s new generation of young state officials, led by Harvard Law graduate Gov. for the Advancement of Colored People) stood for a collection of racial slurs. Edgar Hoover) and claimed the NAACP (National Assn. The film, which wrapped late last month, offers graphic reminders of an era where redneck locals denounced Northern FBI agents as “commie-loving Hoover boys” (for J. Still, no one’s bothered to disguise what state spawned this ugly mayhem. They’ve even disguised the brand of chewing tobacco used by local lawmen, switching from Red Man (the real thing) to Old Jake, a fictional brand designed by the prop department. They’ve also changed the names of the Klansmen and the locations where actual events occurred. Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were jailed by local police, then released later that night-virtually into the arms of Bowers’ Ku Klux Klansmen, who shot them, dumped their car in the Bogue Chitto swamp and buried the trio in an earthen dam on a farm called the Old Jolly Place.įor legal reasons, the filmmakers don’t mention the names of the civil rights workers. Three of the murders occurred on June 21, 1964, on Highway 19, 3 miles east of Philadelphia, Miss. He was also accused of masterminding nine murders, 75 bombings of black churches and 300 assaults and beatings. The state Klan leader, Sam Bowers-later sentenced to 10 years in jail for his role in the civil rights workers’ murders-was a lifelong bachelor who entertained visitors by barking “Heil Hitler” to his dog. Locals in that era scoffed at the activist label-they preferred the term “outside agitator.” By summer’s end, the Mississippi chapter of the Ku Klux Klan had ballooned to more than 5,000 members. The film is set in 1964, during what people here call “The Long Hot Summer.” It was a summer of crisis-a summer when hundreds of young, predominately white civil rights activists invaded Mississippi, trained to educate blacks and help them register to vote. It probes the uneasy alliance of two FBI men, with Hackman as an ex-Mississippi sheriff who’s turned his back on prejudice and Dafoe as a brash Northerner eager to put his Kennedy-era ideals into action. It was a sight to behold-600 rowdy Mississippians standing in a big muddy field on a hot spring night, sweating and hollering, in no mood to leave.ĭue out by Christmas from Orion Pictures, the $15-million Dixie noir looks to be more than just another heated Hollywood polemic about race relations in the South. No one seemed to mind that it was way past midnight, the mosquitos were biting and the ground was so gooey that every time you moved, your feet sank up to your ankles. They’re powerless against us, if every last Anglo-Saxon Christian one of us stands together!” These Northern students, with their atheist communist bosses, came into our community this summer with the wish to destroy it. “They hate us because we present a shining example of successful segregation. “ They hate Mississippi,” the man continued, his eyes shiny with fervor. Waving torches in the air, the crowd erupted with cheers and applause. He stood in front of a huge banner, adorned with the slogan, “Never Never Never.” Shaking his fist, he bellowed, “I love Mississippi!” A tall, angry man-his glasses steamy with perspiration, his face as red as his suspenders-was giving a stem-winding White Citizens Council stump speech. From “Attack on Terror: The FBI Against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi,” by Don WhiteheadĮverybody stared hard at the stage. Their response: “Paint him black and sentence him to life in Mississippi.” During World War II, a group of black soldiers were asked what should be done with Hitler if he were captured alive.