Mississippi Burning Paper

Mississippi Burning Paper

Movies, everyone has seen them and they play a huge part in our world today. Much of our entertainment comes from movies, along with our understanding of historical events. It use to be that we received our knowledge from books and more credible sources, but now an emerging age of , well for lack of a better word "laziness" has resulted in many people receiving their history from Hollywood. Now there is a fine line when it comes to Hollywood credibility, simply for the fact that directors want to captivate audiences through added pizzazz that might not exactly correlate with the actual event. A great example of this happening is with the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, in which the murders of three civil rights workers working down in Mississippi during the freedom summer is interpreted and made into a movie. Though this film won an Oscar and did a decent job of conveying what really happened, there were some inconsistencies, stretchers, and overall misconceptions regarding the event in question and the civil rights movement as a whole.

The film follows fictional FBI agents Anderson (Gene Hackman) and Ward (Willem Dafoe) as they try to prove the culpability of Klan members in the murder. It starts off with the both of them being sent in to investigate the murders of the three civil rights workers. Now from the get go there is a discrepancy, in which the FBI agents are portrayed as heroes. While on the contrary it was exactly the opposite, based on the fact that the government was highly hesitant to intervene in the South and director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover's, outspoken racism. This is later hinted upon when Sheriff Rainey says that "it is all just a hoax put on by that communist King," which is based on Hoover's on going investigation on Martin Luther King being a supposed communist. To understand this you would need an understanding of the civil rights movement, and if not it would just blow right by you, which in the end would hinder your understanding of the quote and mindset of the sheriff. The next hick up I found in the movie was when they were searching the swamp for the bodies of the three civil rights workers, and even though they did not find the actual worker's bodies, the movie failed to show the numerous bodies of African Americans that were found during the search. I believe this damages the impact of what was going on at the time, because by only focusing on the three civil rights workers, it makes it seem that the case at the time is the only act of violence occurring in Mississippi, and the South as a whole. Another problem I had with the film was the vigilante antics exhibited by the FBI agents. Though it gives way for a good movie, it really down plays the hard police work done by the FBI. Another big discrepancy I thought was in the ending scene of the film, in which all the KKK members are arrested and the final scene you see is a tomb stone that reads "Never forgotten..." Which