Commentary: Sixty years on – Mississippi Burning, Democracy under fire – still led and fanned by white people

By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,

Internet Movie Database (IMDb) maintains detailed information about movies: genre, cast, crew, synopsis, related awards, all kinds of details. They label the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning” as crime, drama and mystery. One of the storylines says it like this: “Two FBI agents (Gene Hackman and Willam Dafoe) investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white. The younger agent trained in FBI school runs up against the small-town ways of his former Sheriff partner.” The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won in 1989 for Best Cinematography.
About halfway through, actor Stephen Tobolowsky, playing the role of Clayton Townley – a portrayal of Samuel Holloway Bowers, Jr. (a co-founder of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Grand Dragon of the Mississippi Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan), was asked by a reporter, “Are you sir, a spokesman for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan? He responded, “I told you, I’m a businessman. I’m also a Mississippian, and an American, and I am getting sick and tired of the way many Mississippians are having our views distorted by you newspaper people and on the TV. So, let’s get this straight – we do not accept Jews because they reject Christ and their control of the international banking cartels are at the root of what we call communism today. We do not accept Papists because they bow to a Roman dictator. We do not accept Turks, Mongols, Tartars, Orientals, nor Negros, because we are here to protect Anglo-Saxon democracy and the American way.”
In the very final minutes of the movie, as they were listing character by character, the prison sentences handed down for civil rights crimes, the FBI agents found the white Mayor Tilman of fictionalized Philadelphia, Mississippi – in Jessup County (Neshoba), in a basement, hanging by suicide. Agent Bird, asked Agent-in-Charge Alan Ward, “Why did he do it, he wasn’t even in on it, he wasn’t even Klan? Ward responded, “Mr. Bird, he was guilty, anyone’s guilty who watches this happen and pretends it isn’t. No, he was guilty all right. Just as guilty as the fanatics who pulled the trigger.” After a deep sigh, he added, “maybe we all are.”
Here we are, sixty years on, since the June 21, 1964, murders of three civil rights workers, all in their 20’s – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. The motivation for their killing? They were trying to help African Americans register to vote. Not just anywhere, but in this devoutly oppressive, segregationist and staggeringly backward thinking state. A state that likes to talk progress yet remains anchored to inequality and inequity – a state where discrimination of minorities is as thick as the mud.
Consider for a moment that a century prior to these murders that gained the attention of the world, Mississippi wasn’t poor. Several sources indicate it was once the 5th most prosperous state in the nation – achieved inordinately on the backs of the enslaved – just prior to the Civil War. Yet, the Associated Press reports that from 1982 to 2021, Mississippi was the poorest state for 19 of those 40 years, and in the top five poorest states for 38 of the 40.
Based on Census numbers, which many believe are significantly undercounted, nearly 1 in 5 Mississippians live below the poverty level. So many reasons exist; low wages, low education attainment, poor healthcare system, limited economic diversity, and the legacy of racial inequality that translates into limited economic and social progress. A recent abyss in the poorest state in the nation – the theft, misspending, misappropriation of up to $97 million in federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds. Assistance snatched from the hands of the absolute neediest families, in the poorest state in the nation, by white agency administrators and white state executives. Sixty years on.
Some like to point to progress being made in Mississippi. The state, after 126 years of forcing our African-American population – the largest in the nation per capita – to endure those hellish Stars and Bars and all they represented, finally ushered in a new Mississippi State Flag in 2020. The people had spoken, and with pressure from the Southeastern Conference (college athletics) and others, the legislature did their job – nothing unanimous of course, but change was realized. The last state in the nation to get rid of Confederate battle symbols on the state flag, which had been there from the beginning as retribution against the gains made by African Americans during Reconstruction.
When NBC News spoke to former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice and Chairman of the Commission to Redesign the Mississippi State Flag, Reuben V, Anderson, on November 4, 2020, he shared: “Mississippi voters sent a message to the world that we are moving forward together. I have a renewed sense of hope for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and I know this new symbol creates better prospects for the entire state of Mississippi.”
Sixty years on we remember Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner – young men trying to do what was right and good, yet inescapably running afoul of Mississippi’s white supremacist mindset. Let’s also remember Justice Anderson’s words – moving forward together, hope, and better prospects. Better prospects are synonymous with possibility and likelihood.
Please dear God, please help the prospects for all Mississippians, sixty years on.