"Mississippi Burning": Fact versus Fiction.
In the movie "Mississippi Burning" we see a dramatized version of a non-fiction event that occurred in Mississippi in 1964. The event that occurred in June of 1964 was the slaying of three civil rights activists. The three men consisted of two white men, one who was Jewish, and one African American. The three young men were in Mississippi as volunteers to help and register African Americans to vote. Mississippi was a very segregated state at this time and lots of extremist were against the civil rights movement. There was little played out in the movie "Mississippi Burning" about the activists, but through out you hear a little more about them. But at the beginning you"re not sure why these guys are being killed. Right after the killings the FBI comes in and from then on it's like the FBI show. The director of the film makes it out to be that the FBI agents are the heroes in this situation. After reading information about the Mississippi Burning trail that took place after the bodies were found and people were arrested, the real heroes, besides the activists, were the lawyers who won the case for them. And you don't even see the trial in the movie. The trial was a big deal because there was an all white jury and the .
judge was known as a segregationist who once called an African American a "chimpanzee." The lawyer's name was John Doar, and with his excellent work he got the maximum sentence put on two of the accused. This was incredibly hard to do in Mississippi in 1964. .
The movie puts a lot of emphasis on the work that the FBI did. Granted they did help out in the nationally known case, in the movie they were portrayed to do a lot more than actuality. The FBI agents are made out to look like white liberal men who want nothing less than the equality of minority people, when in fact the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was an extreme racist and could have probably cared less.