TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/010989/01098900.071

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 100 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.