TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010989/01098900.071

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.8 KB | 111 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 60

Just Another Mississippi Whitewash


By Jack E. White


    Here we go again. Exploiting white America's ignorance of
historic racial oppression, Hollywood casts a spotlight on the
rich but neglected story of the black struggle for equal rights.
As has happened with every popular work on the subject, from
Uncle Tom's Cabin to Roots, Mississippi Burning evokes a gasp
of horrified discovery from many whites who act as if they are
learning about the viciousness of slavery and segregation for
the very first time.

Unfortunately, the film does little to deepen the knowledge of
its audience. Though its producers say the movie is fictional,
they so artfully commingle fact and invention that many viewers,
whose ability to discern a whopper when they see one has been
obliterated by an age of TV docudramas, are convinced of its
veracity. They leave the theater believing a version of history
so distorted that it amounts to a cinematic lynching of the
truth.

    From its opening sequence, Burning convincingly recaptures
the racial dread of 1964 Mississippi. But the verisimilitude is
soon sacrificed for a bogus conclusion: that to protect the
rights of blacks, the Federal Government sank to the same level
of lawless terror occupied by the Ku Klux Klan. To the extent
they appear at all, blacks are portrayed as ineffectual victims,
helplessly waiting for the "Kennedy boys" to set them free. In
due course, that is just what happens, as the FBI cracks the
case by brutally intimidating a white witness.

    Not much of this is within spitting distance of what really
occurred. Even the little details in the film -- such as
placing James Chaney, a black thoroughly familiar with the
terrifying back roads of Neshoba County, in the backseat of the
station wagon he was actually driving -- relegate blacks to the
background of the drama of which they were the real-life
heroes. One gets no sense of their courageous struggle against
violent white supremacy and second-class citizenship.

    Even more twisted is the film's depiction of an FBI so
zealous in its defense of black rights that it would resort to
vigilantism to promote them. That contention is laughable to
civil rights veterans of the early 1960s, who pleaded with the
bureau to take a more active role in protecting blacks. Only two
weeks before the murders, a delegation of Mississippi activists
journeyed to Washington to implore federal officials to protect
the civil rights workers who were flocking into the state for
the Freedom Summer. Yet despite repeated appeals to the FBI and
Justice Department on the night the three civil rights workers
disappeared, nearby agents did not arrive in Philadelphia until
the next day. By then it was too late.

    Only after the murders provoked a national outcry did the
FBI enter Mississippi in force and begin a massive effort to
undermine the Klan. Until then Director J. Edgar Hoover's
insistence that the bureau was a strictly investigative agency
forced FBI agents to invest far more energy in busting stolen
car rings and foiling bank robberies than in probing even the
most flagrant depredations against blacks. In 1961 the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights suggested that since the bureau was
often so closely linked to Southern law-enforcement officials,
another group might take over the handling of civil rights
cases. Justice Department prosecutors became so dissatisfied
with the bureau's lethargic performance in voting-rights cases
that they concocted "coaching" memos that spelled out exactly
which questions should be asked of exactly which witness in
civil rights investigations. Only by boxing in the agents in
that way could the lawyers be sure the FBI would gather the
evidence needed to file discrimination suits.

    The truth is that Hoover loathed blacks and detested their
leaders, and so did many of his men. According to an agent
quoted by Hoover's biographer Richard Gid Powers, during the
early '60s "in about 90% of the situations in which bureau
personnel referred to Negroes, the word `nigger' was used."
Until 1962 there were only five black FBI agents: Hoover's
chauffeurs, houseboy and messenger. During the period dealt with
in Burning, Hoover's bureau  was indeed engaged in a lawless
campaign against an enemy. But its target was Martin Luther King
Jr. It began with wiretaps and buggings, approved by then
Attorney General Robert Kennedy, aimed at digging up proof that
King was under the influence of suspected Communists. The
surveillance yielded plenty about King's extramarital affairs,
which Hoover circulated among high government officials and
journalists. In his important study of the civil rights
movement, Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch writes that by 1963
Hoover was so convinced King was a danger to America that the
bureau no longer alerted him to death threats. In late 1964 FBI
agents mailed a threatening letter and tape recording of King's
sexual escapades to his wife, apparently in hopes that the
revelation would drive him to suicide.

    None of these facts are in dispute or particularly
difficult to come by, but the makers of Mississippi Burning, in
their pursuit of a box-office smash, chose to ignore them. In
the process, they have not only turned history inside out but
have also lent support to a racist myth. Says Seth Cagin,
co-author of We Are Not Afraid, a rigorous account of the
Philadelphia murders: "The film suits the fantasy of the Ku Klux
Klan that the FBI was an invading tyrannical force that imposed
its will on the South because it played dirty." It is bad enough
that most Americans know next to nothing about the true story
of the civil rights movement. It would be even worse for them
to embrace the fabrications in Mississippi Burning.