Reel TV’s Role in Mississippi Burning

By Lynn Farley

[1] Filmmaker Alan Parker clicked his directorial remote and momentarily changed channels in Mississippi Burning when he switched on the television news and shot documentary-style to capture the search of the swamp for the bodies of the missing civil rights workers. Movie audiences shifted from passively watching the film’s narrative to being addressed by a reporter and engaged as collective conscience witnessing the frenzied mission. The film reel suddenly becomes realistic TV, but only for a minute.

[2] In reality the FBI did, as fictitious Agent Ward said, “call in the calvary” and send 150 agents to Neshoba County, and the search was in the national spotlight for months. However, Parker’s re-enactment of the coverage and his depiction of the racist onlookers bears closer reading. Why did he choose to shoot and edit the scene as a local news package? What was the purpose of the reporter’s interviews with the locals? According to the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics, it’s the duty of a journalist to seek truth and provide a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues (http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp). The press is based on these principles, but Mississippi Burning, as Parker admits, is not: “It is a fiction. It’s a movie. . . . I keep coming back to truth, but I defend the right to change it in order to reach an audience who knows nothing about the realities and certainly don't watch PBS documentaries” (Wayne King). But they probably watch the evening news. Parker’s news transmission from Jessup County utilized satire to characterize average white Southerners as in-step with Ku Klux Klan platforms. This technique enabled the director’s audience to digest the brutal crime and rampant Mississippi racism much like 1964’s real audience who were in their living rooms watching similar broadcasts. The scene contains only 148 words, but it speaks volumes about the director’s perception of white Mississippi and the way 1960s America was consuming information.

[3] The script is so brief it bears repeating in this essay in order to understand the vernacular and attributes of white Mississippi as compared to the rest of the United States during that time. Fear of Communism, racism, segregation, ignorance, and prejudice are succinctly put forth as essential and interchangeable features of Southern living and KKK membership. One can almost see the flat-top haircuts, horn-rimmed glasses, and beehive up-dos behind the words and under the white masks and robes.

Reporter: How are Negroes treated in Mississippi?
Various Townspersons Comment:
-- They're treated about fair. About as good as they oughta be.
-- The niggers around here have been treated awful bad for a long time.
-- I think Martin Luther King's one of the leaders. I mean, J Edgar Hoover said that he was a communist . . . and they had proof to that effect. But I don't know that for sure. I hadn't seen it myself, but that's what they say. Hey, you really wanna find that nigger?
-- They say we've got to eat together and use the same bathroom as the niggers. And that's awful hard for some Mississippi folks to do.
-- They're not like us. They don't take baths. They stink, they . . . they're nasty . . . they're just not like white folks.
Reporter: What do you think has happened to the three boys?
Townsperson Comments: Dead. Just as dead as they can be.

[4] The Oxford Dictionary defines a documentary as “using pictures or interviews with people involved in real events to provide a factual report on a particular subject.” Parker dipped into the documentary genre for approximately one minute during this scene using a cinema verite style. The fundamentals of that style include following a person during a crisis with a moving, often handheld, camera to capture more personal reactions. Parker borrowed cinema verite and documentary techniques to reinforce Mississippi Burning’s racism message with a communication tool familiar to a 1988 audience--a subtle cue to make the contemporary viewer believe that the moronic white bystanders in the film (“bigots on the street” Brian Johnson called them) were that moronic in real life. After all, they were shot documentary-style, and those cameras don’t lie.

[5] In using this technique, did Parker take another step out-of-historical-bounds to increase the believability of what many critics said was a distorted view of Mississippi? According to Robert Toplin, Parker “had chosen many of the extras for the movie himself, seeking people with ugly, stereotypically redneck features. Virtually all the individuals representing common folk and segregationists in the movie reflect popular images of the southern ‘cracker’” (43). Were all of Mississippi’s 2.2 million residents this racially biased, bigoted, and ignorant? Probably not. Perhaps, in a small effort to infer the existence of a kinder, gentler Mississippi Parker followed the news scene with one of Mrs. Pell playfully holding an African American baby while her racist husband commented, “Funny, their kids are so cute.” This scene wasn’t crucial to the movie’s arc, but it alluded to an imaginary resident of Jessup County (and maybe there was one in the real Neshoba County) who did not ascribe to Ku Klux Klan beliefs.

[6] However, that small counterpoint to the crackers did little to mitigate the glaring point Parker missed in Mississippi Burning: African American residents comprised 42% of Mississippi’s population during Freedom Summer and worked tirelessly for the end of Jim Crow and for their Civil Rights. None of them were interviewed. Coretta Scott King found the omission of their voice the most flagrant violation: “How long will we have to wait before Hollywood finds the courage and the integrity to tell the stories of some of the many thousands of black men, women and children who put their lives on the line for equality?” Clearly, the all-white Mississippians interviewed for the fictional news story offered only one perspective--Alan Parker’s. Granted, he was going for an expose on racism and segregation but does vilifying whites do justice to the almost 50% of Mississippi’s population that he silenced?

[7] In fact, television news was an important communication tool for Civil Rights leaders, who had no hesitancy in speaking to reporters because they knew it was the best way for their struggle to be heard in the North and the South:

Television was covering the explosive Civil Rights Movement regularly and forcefully. It was at this time that the young, articulate and telegenic Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had emerged from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as the Movement's chief spokesman. Commenting on King's oratorical skills, one reporter noted that his ‘message and eloquence were met with rapt attention and enthusiastic support.’ He was the perfect visual symbol for a new era of American race relations. During this period television made it possible for civil rights workers to be seen and heard on an international scale. (Museum of Broadcast Communication)

[8] White America could no longer distance themselves from the non-violent civil disobedience being displayed by proud, intelligent African American men, women, and children as they were water-hosed and beaten by the police:

Watching this film, the viewer would never guess that it was black southerners who fought for civil rights with their lives; who were not merely victims, but were leaders in the struggle of the sixties. . . . If the African Americans in this film are portrayed as passive saints who spent most of their screen time singing spirituals, the vast majority of the white residents of Jessup County are caricatured as slobbering, slightly retarded racists. (Bourgeois)

Parker gave that school of thought more than adequate screen time with what Time called his “searing view of racism.” And history acknowledges that there were many ignorant white racists in the South, particularly in Mississippi. Film reels, newspaper articles, and historical documents of then Governor Paul Johnson’s administration and the Ku Klux Klan’s atrocities in Neshoba County more than confirm those facts.

[7] Parker’s one-minute scene touched upon a larger American backstory about the deeply intertwined relationship between the Civil Rights movement and television. In 1960, CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid famously said, “No one should have illusions about television. It is never going to be primarily an educational and cultural medium.” Sevareid was wrong. Both culture-changing institutions actually were part of the real Civil Rights story. Because of television, racism crossed the Mason-Dixon line and invaded the North’s living rooms on a daily basis in the sixties. “News about the tragedy near Philadelphia, Mississippi, as well as reports of other violent acts aroused the nation,” says Toplin, “The public became upset with the evidence of physical intimidation and murder. Televised news footage and photographs in newspapers featured graphic evidence of segregationists’ abuses.” The problem could no longer be confined to Southern borders:

Television's incessant probing into the murders and subsequent month-long search for the bodies of two white, Northern civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and black, Southerner James Chaney did have a chilling effect on the nation. With the death of innocent white volunteers, television was convincing its suburban viewers around the country that the Civil Rights Movement did concern them as well. . . . Television ultimately legitimated and lent new urgency to the decade-long struggle for basic human and civil rights that the Civil Rights Movement had difficulty achieving prior to the television age. (Museum of Broadcast Communication)

Even though Parker never mentioned the names of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, he alluded to the importance of the crime on a national level by including television’s presence in Mississippi Burning. The one-minute news feature was short but not insignificant. During that brief window, Parker broadcast blatant racism through the intimate lens of reality TV in order to publicly display a state out-of-touch with its country.