Before it went defunct in 1999, Orion Pictures produced and distributed Alan Parker’s period piece Mississippi Burning in 1988. I knew nothing about the story the film was based on, the plot of the film itself, or the criticism around it. All I knew about the film was the captivating poster:
It became clear to me fairly early on that the film was exceptional. By the end, I considered it one of the best Hollywood-produced dramas of the 1980s — not exactly a decade that produced many filmic masterpieces, though it has the lion’s share of cult classics.
The time is Mississippi. The year is 1964. FBI agents Anderson (Gene Hackman, nominated for Best Actor) and Ward (Willem Dafoe, who should have been nominated) are the unwelcomed strangers who arrive into town to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers, two Caucasians and one Black. What the audience knows, though, is that this was not a disappearance — but a murder. Anderson and Ward, at odds over how they go about doing things, each set out to find out who exactly was behind it.
Ward is by the book. He’s the young, idealistic horn-rimmed bleeding heart Kennedy liberal eager to use all the Bureau tools available to him, oblivious — or ignoring — the optics of clean-cut white agents from Washington storming into the dusty town. A great scene is when Ward and Anderson enter a packed diner at lunchtime, a segregated diner. Ward brazenly walks past all the white customers to question a Black man quietly eating in the back. The whole diner turns to watch the scene in silence. Anderson, too, who warns Ward not to make such a scene, also stands and watches. The Black man does not want to talk to Ward, but the damage was done: Klansmen later find and beat up the man to the point of death, for no reason at all.
Anderson, the older and more seasoned agent, has his own style of figuring out what happened to the three young men. He finds in the Frances McDormand character (nominated for Best Supporting Actress), housewife to a racist deputy sheriff (Brad Dourif), a source of information — and, by the end, genuine affection. McDormand here shows the flashes of brilliance that will emerge later in works like Fargo.
The film is based on an actual incident, the June 1964 abduction of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The murders became known as the Freedom Summer murders, the Mississippi civil rights workers’ murders, or the Mississippi Burning murders, from which the film takes its name. The young men were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations and its member org, CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality).
Interestingly, a year before in Louisiana, CORE ran a voter registration line in Clinton where David Ferrie and Clay Shaw allegedly drove Lee Harvey Oswald to register in vote, the lone white in line and thus easily recognizable.
Upon its release, Mississippi Burning underwent intense criticism, which may have hindered its quest for Academy Awards (it lost to Rain Man, winning only for Best Cinematography). While the characters and setting are fictional, the film received backlash from the families of the real-life activists.
Carolyn Goodman, the mother of Andrew Goodman, thought that the film “used the deaths of the boys as a means of solving the murders and the FBI being heroes.” The younger brother of James Chaney called it “terribly dishonest and very racist.” Spike Lee thought the film relied on the white savior narrative. (When Lee turned his lens to the place and time in question, he chose a documentary format. See 4 Little Girls, 1997. See also the six-hour PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, 1987–1990).
A number of reflections on the film published online reinforce this criticism. They include:
Kristen Hoerl, “Burning Mississippi into Memory? Cinematic Amnesia as a Resource for Remembering Civil Rights” (2009)
Judy Richardson, “Mississippi Burning Is Still Burning: A Critical Film Review” (undated)
Richardson highlights director Alan Parker’s quote defending the film:
“The two heroes had to be white. That is a reflection of our society, as much as of the film industry. At this point in time, it could not have been made any other way.”
Parker (1944–2020), best known for Pink Floyd — The Wall (1982), was an English filmmaker. The screenplay for Mississippi Burning was by another white man, Chris Gerolmo, who began writing the script in 1985. Alan Parker devoted months of research into the case and time period before production. Gerolmo’s script was also nominated for Best Screenplay. Producer Frederick Zollo brokered the sale of the script to Orion. [In 1992, Gerolmo directed a short film starring Gary Sinise and Elijah Wood, The Witness, set in a Nazi concentration camp with Sinise a soldier and Wood a young Jewish boy.]
It should be noted that Mississippi Burning, the story and film as told and made by these particular storytellers and filmmakers, was not produced as a documentary. Parker is speaking frankly when he states the protagonists had to be white, making clear that “at this point in time, it could not have been made any other way.”
Parker’s comment and the criticism about the film echoes the current wave of censorship that demands writers only write about their own race, religion and experiences. This has come to light in a few recent incidents, one of which centered around the 2023 film Golda, starring Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, former Israeli prime minister from 1969–1974. The screenwriter was the British writer Nicholas Martin. According to Deadline, criticism arose against Martin and Mirren because they were non-Jewish.
“It’s more frightening for a writer to be told they are not allowed to write about subjects with which they don’t have an immediate DNA connection,” Mirren said in response. “I imagine it must be very alarming. And ridiculous.” Martin himself called this censorship mentality “creeping authoritarianism.” “Am I just supposed to write about middle-aged men living in south London?” he asked.
Performances of a play at Santa Monica College were canceled over this very issue. The play in question was By the River Rivanna by G. Bruce Smith, about a contemporary Black man who discovers an enslaved ancestor’s journal and begins to have dreams about his ancestors. According to Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times, a student was “offended that it was written by a white man and directed by a South Asian woman. ‘It’s not their story to tell,’ the student wrote to the administration.
“The censorship impulse on both extremes of the political spectrum is strangling discourse, critical thinking and, really, the human spirit,” Abcarian wrote. “As a writer, I have to believe in my bones that anyone can write about anything.”
Abcarian goes on to mention a few examples — Porgy and Bess, for one, which James Baldwin deemed “a white man’s version of Negro life,” and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. “Told from a white point of view? Yes, but a brilliant and moving story nonetheless,” Abcarian wrote.
There is perhaps unintentional irony in criticism for Golda leveled by British actress Maureen Lippman: “I’m sure [Helen Mirren] will be marvelous, but it would never be allowed for Ben Kingsley to play Nelson Mandela. You just couldn’t even go there.” Kingsley, who is English with Indian heritage on his father’s side, won an Oscar for playing Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi won Best Picture, and was directed by Englishman Richard Attenborough and written by a white man from Michigan, John Briley, who won Best Original Screenplay.
Or, we might consider Steven Spielberg’s magisterial Schindler’s List, whose main protagonist is not a Jew but a Czech Catholic, Oskar Schindler, played by a Northern Ireland native (Liam Neeson).
Alan Parker is arguing that if the means by which stories like Mississippi Burning were not employed at the time — relying on recognizable, bankable stars (Hackman, Defoe), a crime-thriller genre, a narrative hook of two (white) strangers coming to town — then the film would not have been made, certainly not in 1988, less than a quarter of a century after the events depicted.
As such, Mississippi Burning predates the conscious virtue signaling that dominates today’s narratives on streaming and elsewhere. It immerses the viewer in the 1960s South in a way that does feel like a documentary — so immersive it’s hard to figure when exactly the film was shot.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars, making clear that the film’s primary purpose was to not make a documentary or painstaking stick to historical facts (the film, for instance, takes place in fictional Jessup County, Mississippi) but to remain committed to telling its story as a movie: it does not pretend to be more than what it is. Hollywood motion pictures are in the business of commerce and entertainment. The goal for a company like Orion Pictures is to hopefully strike critical and commercial success with its projects. So while one is certainly entitled to criticize Mississippi Burning, it ultimately is criticizing something that managed to strike a balance between appropriate thriller motifs and searing racial drama.
Ebert wrote:
“Mississippi Burning” is the best American film of 1988 and a likely candidate for the Academy Award as the year’s best picture.
Apart from its pure entertainment value — this is the best American crime movie in years — it is an important statement about a time and a condition that should not be forgotten. The Academy loves to honor prestigious movies in which long-ago crimes are rectified in far-away places. Here is a nominee with the ink still wet on its pages.
It is also a testament to the breadth and depth of the Civil Rights Movement that there is no one film that can wholly characterize it. There’s Mississippi Burning but there’s also the far inferior Ghosts of Mississippi. There’s All the Way about LBJ and MLK, Selma about MLK, Lee’s own Malcolm X and Get on the Bus, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, to name a few. The stories and drama, really, are endless.
I would argue Ward and Anderson are not heroes in the vein of the white savior narrative, even if Parker refers to them as such (I suspect he means “heroes” in the general way dramatists refer to protagonists). Instead, I submit Frances McDormand’s hairstylist Mrs. Pell is the film’s hero, a heroine who we see is genuine friends with a young Black mother, who knows she will live and die there in Mississippi, and knows that she is at the mercy of her abusive sheriff husband. She knows the supremacist mindset around her is wrong, but what can she do? What she sees in Hackman’s Anderson is an opportunity to do something of meaning. So she confesses.
Because the Klan factors so prominently in the story, the film masterfully depicts what Christian nationalism looked and smelled like at the time. This milieu as shown in Mississippi Burning, I believe, better captured the hostile environment that contributed to the assassination of President Kennedy in the South far more than in Oliver Stone’s JFK. This worldview is summarized in Mississippi Burning by Klan leader Clayton Townley (Stephen Tobolowsky) when confronted by reporters:
“I am getting sick and tired of the way many of us Mississippians are havin’ our views distorted by your newspaper people and on TV. So let’s get this straight. We do not accept Jews because they reject Christ. And their control of the international banking cartels are at the root of what we call communism today. We do not accept Papists because they bow to a Roman dictator. We do not accept Turks, Mongols, Tartars, Orientals nor Negroes because we’re here to protect Anglo-Saxon democracy and the American way.”
Although white men produced the film, there is no softening the vitriol that spewed from the supremacists that populate it. Townley’s little speech neatly summarizes not only what the Klan believed, but also what the Christian nationalists who fought tooth and nail to preserve, as Delphine Roberts so succinctly put it in 1962, “the white race of Jesus.”
