Trigger Warning: This article contains graphic imagery.
DirectorAlan Parker’s 1988 filmMississippi Burningis a crime thriller that remains popular with audiences and critics. The award-winning film, aided by career-high performances fromGene Hackman,Willem Dafoe, andFrances McDormand, centers on two FBI agents who arrive in fictional Jessup Country, Mississippi to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers. Their investigation isn’t warmly welcomed, and they are met with hostility by the local police, the townspeople, and the Ku Klux Klan. The movie is loosely based on the true story of the murder of three activists in the state in 1964, launching an investigation code-named “Mississippi Burning” (MIBURN), from which the film takes its name.Just how loosely based on truth the film is has been a point of either contention or praise to this day.
Mississippi Burning
Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe star as FBI agents navigating a volatile environment in Mississippi during the height of the civil rights movement. Their investigation into the disappearance of civil rights workers exposes a web of racism, corruption, and violence, challenging them to seek justice in the face of relentless adversity.
Is ‘Mississippi Burning’ Based on a True Story?
Mississippi Burningsets up the lay of the land for the film as it opens on a public building that has separate water fountains segregated by race before switching to an old, wooden country church ablaze. Three civil rights workers, one Black and two white, are then seen driving down a rural road at sunset in the summer of 1964. They are in the state working on getting Black people voting rights, and that hasn’t gone over well. They are tailgated by several vehicles, one of which is a police car, and are pulled over. The unseen officer informs them they were speeding, only that was just a ruse to get them to pull over, and the three men are murdered by the officer and several other K.K.K. members. Although the film eschewsvery, very close to the actual eventshere, there are some details changed, or left out altogether. The work the men were doing was part of a massive three-month initiative, “Freedom Summer,” to register Black people from the South to vote. That isn’t disclosed in the film, and although not relevant to the story, a mention of the broader scale of the initiative, at the very least, would have been good. The men were pulled over for speeding but werearrested and brought back to Neshoba Country prisonfor just over 7 hours before being released. It was then they were followed, but were abducted and driven to another location before being shot. The biggest issue - and the root of some of the film’s harshest criticism - is thatthe men are never named, and Neshoba County is replaced by the fictional Jessup County.
Two F.B.I. agents, Rupert Anderson (Gene Hackman) and Alan Ward (Willem Dafoe) are called on to lead the investigation into the missing men. Ward is a clean-cut, young by-the-book agent, while Anderson is a little older, and well acquainted with how the “system works” in the South, and the two, despite their liberalism, don’t see eye to eye. The pair seem to be set up as the “good cop, bad cop” trope of many crime films, only theagents that the pair are based on,John ProctorandJoseph Sullivansequentially, did share commonalities with their fictional kin. That said, the division between the two methods seems to be amplified for Hollywood purposes, and most likely not the case in real life. Additionally, as per the F.B.I., a number of agents appeared in the county to begin interviews on June 22nd, not just Proctor and Sullivan.
How Accurate Is ‘Mississippi Burning’?
The South in 1964 was very much as depicted inMississippi Burning. As stated in the previously cited New York Times, police who were members of the Klan routinely covered up killings and beatings and did, as Sheriff Pell (Brad Dourif) tells reporters in the film, refer to the N.A.A.C.P. with a variety of slurs. Burning crosses, too, were a regular sight not exaggerated in the film. ThroughoutMississippi Burning, many scenes depict racial injustices being carried out.Whether these injustices played out as they do in the film isn’t certain, the fact that they happened at all is, in fact, true. When Ward sits with a young Black man in the Black section of a restaurant and talks to him, the young man is later brutally beaten by Klansmen, and beatings under similar circumstances occurred in real life. Churches and homes getting lit up happened, with F.B.I. records indicating that K.K.K. nightriders burned down 31 Black churches in Mississippi from June 1964 to January 1965. There is another scene in the film where F.B.I. agent Monk (Badja Djola) kidnaps thetown’s racist mayorand threatens to lop off his naughty bits if he doesn’t give up the names of the perpetrators. It’s a scene that couldn’t have happened as seen (there were no Black F.B.I. agents in 1964), and may not have happened at all. The description of the castration of a young Black man that Monk tells the mayor, however, does have roots in reality, taken from a description of a real castration of a Black man given by a Klansman.
As faithful as the film may depict these horrors, there are two missed opportunities from real life that could have madeMississippi Burningthat much more impactful had they been included. F.B.I. agents find and unearth the bodies of the three missing men in the movie. That did happen, 44 days after agents began their search, but what the movie leaves out, according to the New York Times, is the fact thatthey found many other bodies that they weren’t looking for. One was a 14-year-old boy who was never identified, and two Black men who were eventually found to have been victims of the Klan as well. Also left out of the film is the fact that, according to the Guardian,Martin Luther King Jr.himself was in the area at the time of the investigation. He stopped in Philadelphia, Mississippi about a month after the disappearances, saying, “This is a terrible town. The worst I’ve ever seen. There is a complete reign of terror here.”
How Is ‘Mississippi Burning’s Ending Different Than What Happened in Real Life?
The case is finally cracked inMississippi Burningthanks to the help of the sheriff’s wife (Frances McDormand), who is charmed into giving up her husband by Anderson, and the staging of a Klan retribution against one of the conspirators, Lester Cowens (Pruitt Taylor Vince), in the case. It leads to the arrest of seven Klansmen behind the crime, with all but the sheriff receiving sentences ranging from 3 to 10 years. In reality, it took nearly three years of relentless badgering of two participants into admissions and thetestimony of an informant who was paid $30,000to do so. According to the FBI, 18 suspects were indicted and arrested, and in 1967 only seven of the 18, including Deputy SheriffCecil Price, were found guilty. But not of murder, only minor conspiracy charges, and none served more than six years. One of the eleven that weren’t found guilty,Edgar Ray Killen, was freed when a lone juror couldn’t bring herself to convict a Baptist preacher.Killen would get his due, however, after the Mississippi Attorney General’s office reopened the case and convicted the former Ku Klux Klan leader on manslaughter charges in 2005. Killen would die in prison in 2018, two years after the investigation was formally closed.
One of the criticisms of the film is thatit reeks of the “white savior” trope, and it’s hard not to agree. Apart from F.B.I. agent Monk,there are noBlack protagonists. The two leads are white. Arrests are only made after a white woman gives up information about the crime. The argument can be made that if you’re going to fictionalize the story anyway, there’s no harm in bringing in a Black character that serves as more than a background presence cowering in feat. That said, the argument can also be made that there was no need to fictionalize the storyat all, thathaving removed references to the real people and areas involved it lessens the story and lets them off the hookto a degree. According to the Guardian, another criticism brought forward by civil rights leaders likeCoretta Scott King, the wife of M.L.K., is ignoring the role of Black and white activists in the investigation. Yet the film does shine a light on a horrifying reality, bringing it to the attention of the masses. As stated in an interview with the L.A. Times, Orion Pictures production chiefMike Medavoysaid, “If we’d decided to do it as a documentary, it might have been admired but it would have gone on the shelf and far fewer people would have seen it.” It’s foolish to believe the argument about the pros and cons ofMississippi Burninghas a definitive answer. It’s a circular argument that ultimately falls upon the viewer to choose which side they are on. Only the ugly truths that the film reveals are undeniable and sadly have never gone away since that dark day in 1964.
Mississippi Burningis available to rent on Apple TV+ in the U.S.
Watch on Apple TV+
