Return to "Mississippi Burning"

[Tiassa]

Source: Washington Post
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54572-2005Jan6.html
Title: "'Mississippi Burning' Case Reopened; 1 Man Arrested"
Date: January 7, 2005

Mississippi delved into its troubled past late yesterday as sheriff's deputies arrested an 80-year-old reputed Ku Klux Klan member on charges of killing three young voting rights workers in 1964 in one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era.

Edgar Ray Killen, known as "The Preacher," was taken into custody in central Mississippi hours after a grand jury convened in Philadelphia, Miss., to hear evidence in the killing of the three activists, a crime dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning." The names of the three -- Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney -- have long been synonymous with the horrors that often accompanied attempts to desegregate the Deep South and bring basic voting rights to the disenfranchised.

Washington Post

You know, the film Mississippi Burning is one I haven't seen for over a decade, but it still sticks with me. Willem Dafoe is outstanding as Ward, and Gene Hackman is, well Gene Hackman. And the movie brings us one of the most infamous quotes of our time: "You only left me a nigger, but at least I shot me a nigger."

I can still hear it clearly, just looking at it on the screen.

See the film.

• • •​

See, the thing is that a dead man couldn't get a fair trial in the South if he was black, or if he didn't hate blacks. Perhaps I overstate the case, but the article notes that Killen is the first person to be arrested on murder charges.

The case, like so many slayings of the civil rights era, lingered in the minds of the next generations of civil rights activists. It came to be known as the "Mississippi Burning" case after the film's release, but its mysteries remained unsolved. As the years passed, evidence surfaced, keeping the case alive for the victims' family members, who have maintained that justice was denied.

In 1999, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger published an interview with Sam Bowers, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who said he was glad to see the ringleader of the crime go free. Later, a group known as the Philadelphia Coalition pushed Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood to reopen the investigation ....

.... Mississippi has had some success over the years in exorcising demons of its past with high-profile prosecutions of decades-old cases. In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in the 1963 assassination of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, 37. In 2003, Ernest Avants, 72, a reputed Klansman, was convicted of killing a black sharecropper named Ben Chester White as part of a plot to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. by luring him to southern Mississippi

Washington Post

Only the good die young, they say. And Justice might move slowly, but it still may come. It will be interesting to watch this case progress, and watch for a new DVD release of the movie, I'm sure.

As beautiful a moment as this is supposed to be, well, it's still America. You think they'll go with a Collector's Edition, or a Commemorative reissue complete with hour-long documentary?
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Notes:

Roig-Franzia, Manuel. "'Mississippi Burning' Case Reopened; 1 Man Arrested". Washington Post, January 7, 2005; age A01. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54572-2005Jan6.html​

 

[Lemming3k]

You know, the film Mississippi Burning is one I haven't seen for over a decade, but it still sticks with me.

It was on TV yesterday in England, strange coincidence really, a serious lack of justice will always stick with you in life, and im not sure these people even regret the things they have done, its rather disturbing to think about.

As beautiful a moment as this is supposed to be, well, it's still America. You think they'll go with a Collector's Edition, or a Commemorative reissue complete with hour-long documentary?

I'd say a 2 disk DVD including 'special features' and then a later re-release of the package with the 'i shot me a nigger' documentary added, after all, anything to make some money these days. I dread to think how right i may be.