Burning Mississippi into Memory? Cinematic Amnesia as a Resource for Remembering Civil Rights

Abstract

The 1988 film Mississippi Burning drew extensive criticism for its misleading portrayal of the FBI's investigation of three murdered civil rights activists in 1964. As critics noted, the film ignored the role of Black activists who struggled for racial justice even as it graphically depicted the violence that activists and other Blacks faced during the civil rights era. This movie's selective depiction of events surrounding the activists’ deaths constituted the film as a site of cinematic amnesia, a form of public remembrance that provokes controversy over how events ought to be remembered. An analysis of the film and its ensuing controversy illustrates how provocatively forgetful texts can simultaneously prompt media attention to political activism and deflect attention from contemporary racial injustice.

Keywords:

• Mississippi Burning
• Cinematic Amnesia
• Popular Memory
• Civil Rights

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Susan Brinson, Michael Lane Bruner, Dana Cloud, Emmett Winn, Eric King Watts, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice and commentary on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. These newspapers are: The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Buffalo News, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Columbus Dispatch, The Houston Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The New York Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The St. Petersburg Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

2. The term public memory has been used to refer to both memories that are available to publics and the memories of publics (Eberly, 2004; Phillips 2004). Social and rhetorical theorists have distinguished publics as discursive formations within democracies that have emancipatory (Habermas, 1996) and hegemonic (Ely, 1997) implications. A critical conception of publics also suggests that publics comprise spaces for political critique and challenge to dominant discourse and ideology (Eberly, 2004; Fraser, 1997).

3. Parker's speculation about the commercial appeal of a historical civil rights film is arguable. Other filmmakers who have made films about racial conflict that featured Blacks centrally within that struggle such as Spike Lee's (1989) Do the Right Thing received 27 million dollars at the box office according to the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com). The success of Spike Lee's (1992) biographical film Malcolm X, which received $48 million in box office returns, indicates that films that closely follow biographical narratives may also attract large audiences. However, the lack of financial support from White Hollywood for films that feature Black struggles also attests to the difficulties filmmakers face in creating these films. Indeed, Lee had to secure much of the film's funding from outside of the Hollywood film industry and relied heavily on the support of Black actors and the African American community to complete production of Malcolm X (Winn, 2001). Although the Hollywood industry has more recently given positive attention to films featuring strong Black performances and Black characters including Dreamgirls (Condon, 2006), Hotel Rwanda (George, 2004), The Last King of Scotland (Macdonald, 2006), Monster's Ball (Forster, 2001), Ray (Hackford, 2004), and Training Day (Fuqua, 2001), the themes in these films do not advance greater awareness of racial struggles in the United States. Recent historically driven films, such as Hotel Rwanda (George, 2004) and The Last King of Scotland (Macdonald, 2006), have focused on international conflicts that avoid criticisms of the White power structure in the United States. Other movies such as Glory Road (Gartner, 2006), The Hurricane (Jewison, 1999), and Ray (Hackford, 2004), have contributed to White hegemony by depicting instances of racial discrimination as historic events that have been overcome in recent decades.

4. Cop action films typically pair an unhinged White cop with a more civil Black officer who collaborate to defeat a powerful villain (Ames, 1992). It is intriguing that Mississippi Burning engages the dynamic between two law enforcement officers as a plot device in a film explicitly about race relations, yet both of the film's central characters are White. Parker's choices reflect his blending of filmic conventions where it suited his interests; given that there were no Black FBI agents at the time of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman's murders, an emphasis on a Black law enforcement official in Mississippi might have made its historical relevance inconceivable.

5. Economic disparities between Blacks and Whites were ongoing in Mississippi when the film showed in theatres. Lipper (1989) reported that Blacks held less than 12 percent of management positions as of the 1980 census. Lipper also cited the Mississippi Research and Development Center's findings that Blacks frequently earned less than Whites in comparable jobs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl is an assistant professor of communication at Auburn University, Portions of this manuscript appeared in the author's doctoral dissertation and as a manuscript presented at the 2007 National Communication Association conference in San Antonio, TX