Word: mississippi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...overflowed their banks. "A spirit of change and recklessness seemed to pervade the very inhabitants of the forest," a naturalist wrote afterward. Squirrels inexplicably marched southward in migration, tens of thousands at a time. They plunged heedlessly into the Ohio River and drowned. Earthquakes reversed the flow of the Mississippi so that its waters surged upstream at the speed of galloping horses. Whole forests fell down, like stacked fields of rifles toppling. A double-tailed comet appeared in the night sky over America...
Goodgame, 34, confesses to being not so patient a waiter as Duffy, but he's learning. A native of Pascagoula, Miss., Goodgame studied at the University of Mississippi and at Oxford. After stints at the Tampa Tribune and Miami Herald, he joined TIME's Los Angeles bureau in 1984, where he covered everything from immigration to movie stars. "My editors, in their wisdom, saw some natural progression from profiling Bill Cosby to covering the President," he says...
...magnolia-lined grounds of the University of Mississippi last August, arsonists torched the first black fraternity house before its members had even moved in. At Memphis State University last fall, the Jewish Student Union was spray-painted with swastikas. Gay men and lesbians at the University of Texas at Austin have been pelted with rocks and beer bottles while participating in campus parades. At Temple University in Philadelphia, 130 undergraduates have formed a White Students Union dedicated to fighting affirmative-action programs and promoting "white pride...
None of these facts are in dispute or particularly difficult to come by, but the makers of Mississippi Burning, in their pursuit of a box-office smash, chose to ignore them. In the process, they have not only turned history inside out but have also lent support to a racist myth. Says Seth Cagin, co-author of We Are Not Afraid, a rigorous account of the 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...
...COVER: Mississippi Burning rekindles memories and ignites debate...