Word: klan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more than 500, moviegoers will get to see what all the shouting is about. For more than two hours, director Alan Parker splatters grotesque and gorgeous images on his large canvas. Indomitable black preachers lead services in the charred husks of their churches. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan mass for a venomous camp meeting. And everywhere there is the blaze of torch-song tragedy as black schools and shacks crumble in the embers of the Klan's fury...
This is one of Mississippi Burning's two main fictional conceits: that the FBI broke the case in part by locating not the fear and greed of a Klan informant, but the flinty, vindictive soul of Southern integrity. The other conceit is as low-road as the plot twist in a kung fu scuzzathon. The film imagines that the FBI imported a free-lance black operative to terrorize the town's mayor into revealing the murderers' names. Taken (like much else in the picture) from a report in William Bradford Huie's 1965 casebook, Three Lives for Mississippi, the scene...
...filmmakers were politicians: they would be using the new Mississippi to depict the old. Mostly, the shooting proceeded without incident. Sometimes, though, old images must have haunted the older townsfolk. One day Colesberry spotted one of the crew's pickup trucks toting a huge Klan cross through town and had the driver cover it up. During the ten-week shoot, derelict churches and other structures were set ablaze; production paused while the ashes cooled down. One evening the company assembled to film the burning of a local black church, which had been bought and would be rebuilt to the congregation...
From its opening sequence, Burning convincingly recaptures the racial dread of 1964 Mississippi. But the verisimilitude is soon sacrificed for a bogus conclusion: that to protect the rights of blacks, the Federal Government sank to the same level of lawless terror occupied by the Ku Klux Klan. To the extent they appear at all, blacks are portrayed as ineffectual victims, helplessly waiting for the "Kennedy boys" to set them free. In due course, that is just what happens, as the FBI cracks the case by brutally intimidating a white witness...
Only after the murders provoked a national outcry did the FBI enter Mississippi in force and begin a massive effort to undermine the Klan. 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...