To the editors:
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Mississippi Burning is a film that its producers, for better or worse, have admitted is a FICTIONALIZED account of what happened in a small town when two liberal FBI agents come to investigate the murders of three activists involved in a Black voter registration campaign. Granted the film is problematic in that its fictionalization robs the viewers of a genuinely factual history lesson; and, the FBI agents (who represent a conservative, hardly anti-racist organization) are portrayed as the good guys. But the value of this film lies in its gruesomely accurate, truly moving account of what it was like to be a Black person in the racially segregated South, living under the Jim Crow laws, and utterly helpless in the face of local Klan-infested governments and police. This is a part of American history which is rarely presented in mainstream films.
Finally, the film’s message is presented in what Rosenbaum terms its “splashiest” scene. But he was too busy looking at the “palatial” setting to hear what was being said. When the Black minister cries, in his eulogy for the murdered Black civil rights worker, “They want me to say we mourn for the families of the white boys; but I am sick and tired, and I want you to be sick and tired with me. I am sick of young Black men being killed!”, every person in that theater is outraged too–and a few just may be inclined to want to fight the racism that is still rampant in our society.
