Word: civilizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...British director's idea of what a Southern face looks like. Pretty people need not apply." Rhodes was looking for dark skin, strong bone structure, "dignity." She visited nursing homes, prowled the streets of black neighborhoods and hired homeless men for walk-ons. She had studied photographs of civil rights marchers and wanted similar faces -- "people who had been dragged off bar stools. All their faces said, 'I have been through some pain...
Even more twisted is the film's depiction of an FBI so zealous in its defense of black rights that it would resort to vigilantism to promote them. That contention is laughable to civil rights veterans of the early 1960s, who pleaded with the bureau to take a more active role in protecting blacks. Only two weeks before the murders, a delegation of Mississippi activists journeyed to Washington to implore federal officials to protect the civil rights workers who were flocking into the state for the Freedom Summer. Yet despite repeated appeals to the FBI and Justice Department...
...Until then Director J. Edgar Hoover's insistence that the bureau was a strictly investigative agency forced FBI agents to invest far more energy in busting stolen car rings and foiling bank robberies than in probing even the most flagrant depredations against blacks. In 1961 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights suggested that since the bureau was often so closely linked to Southern law-enforcement officials, another group might take over the handling of civil rights cases. Justice Department prosecutors became so dissatisfied with the bureau's lethargic performance in voting-rights cases that they concocted "coaching" memos that spelled...
...with wiretaps and buggings, approved by then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, aimed at digging up proof that King was under the influence of suspected Communists. The surveillance yielded plenty about King's extramarital affairs, which Hoover circulated among high government officials and journalists. In his important study of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch writes that by 1963 Hoover was so convinced King was a danger to America that the bureau no longer alerted him to death threats. In late 1964 FBI agents mailed a threatening letter and tape recording of King's sexual escapades...
...Philadelphia murders: "The film suits the fantasy of the Ku Klux Klan that the FBI was an invading tyrannical force that imposed its will on the South because it played dirty." It is bad enough that most Americans know next to nothing about the true story of the civil rights movement. It would be even worse for them to embrace the fabrications in Mississippi Burning...