Word: neshoba
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Chamber of Commerce brochure, Neshoba County, Miss...
...next six weeks, FBI agents blanketed the area, quizzing the friendly folks of Neshoba County. Reporters from all over tested the residents' hospitality. Navy frogmen fished the lakes and ponds, searching for evidence of the local hunters' blood sport. In August, thanks to a $30,000 payoff to an informant, the FBI discovered the bodies in a new earth dam. Four months later, the Philadelphia sheriff, his deputy and 17 others were arrested, and in 1967 seven of the 19 (including the deputy but not his boss) were convicted of conspiracy to murder...
...Mississippi Burning opens, three civil rights workers ride through Jessup (Neshoba) County, avid to get out of town. Their station wagon is overtaken by some good ole boys in a pickup truck. Blam! Blam! Blam! Officially, the three are "missing." FBI agents Ward (Dafoe) and Anderson (Hackman) know otherwise. They might be from two different colleges -- say, Harvard and Hard Knocks. But they are both feds in a bad town, and they know what smells. The sheriff, for one. "You down here to help us solve our nigger problem?" he asks agreeably. No. They are there to wash some soiled...
...political consciousness, not just in the South or in America, but in the whole world." Can Mississippi Burning help raise that consciousness once again, even as it has already raised old hackles? Perhaps not. But even that frail hope makes Parker's determination to go hunting and fishing in Neshoba County worth the trip...
...much of this is within spitting distance of what really occurred. Even the little details in the film -- such as placing James Chaney, a black thoroughly familiar with the terrifying back roads of Neshoba County, in the backseat of the station wagon he was actually driving -- relegate blacks to the background of the drama of which they were the real-life heroes. One gets no sense of their courageous struggle against violent white supremacy and second-class citizenship...