Suspect charged in 'Mississippi Burning' killings

Forty years after 2 civil rights workers and a local African American attempting to register African American voters in Mississippi were murdered, the alleged killer may finally be held to account.  

An 80-year-old Mississippi man was arrested Thursday in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers whose bodies were buried in an earthen dam outside the town of Philadelphia -- killings that spurred national support for the civil rights movement.

These killings were the subject of the 1988 movie, Mississippi Burning, starring a favorite of mine, Gene Hackman.  What struck me when I first saw this movie was how far I thought we'd come from 1964. Ha!

Just two generations ago, even the voter registration of African Americans was a life and death struggle.  These days, it's a "clean" kill: no real evidence of wrong doing, no smoking guns.  

Today was supposedly a victory for American progressive thought: in contrast to the 2000 debacle, we had one Senator join the House in forcing floor debates.  

The debates? Lots of chest beating from the left, lots of mockery from the right.  Disappointng and reprehensible, respectively, this was a symbolic farce.

This quote spoke volumes for me:

Claude McInnis, the executive vice chair of the state Democratic Party, said, "My hat's off to them in making this arrest."

"Justice always prevails and if you commit crimes, you face justice," said McInnis, a former sharecropper and civil rights activist. "But there is another old saying that justice delayed is justice denied."

     

I think a great many of us understood the dire implications of 2004's voter suppression; our leaders, real or imagined, did not.  

Justice delayed, again.  It'a not a good thing.  

•  And this would be

  
  this would be the link

  by 2lucky on Fri Jan 07, 2005 at 01:50:23 AM PDT

  •  make the link post 2lucky's tip jar

    by Liberation Learning on Fri Jan 07, 2005 at 01:57:02 AM PDT

•  There can be no tolerance

  of vote suppression.

  It is debases our entire democracy.  

  And there is no excuse for not fixing the system - as it woud be so easy to do.  Just make sure that there are national standards, optical scanner ballots, funding for election workers and fair and open procedures for counting and recounting.  

  Since it so easy to "fix" the system - there can only one reason why it is not getting getting fixed.  And that, my friends, is a shame.

  by Liberation Learning on Fri Jan 07, 2005 at 02:00:18 AM PDT

•  Mississippi Burning

  What struck me when I first saw this movie was how far I thought we'd come from 1964. Ha!

  Yes, and that is why Mississippi Burning is such a terrible movie.  Strike that.  It's a fine movie.  It's a terrible piece of history with ideas that are, to quote Jon Stewart, "hurting America."

  All Hollywood movies about the civil rights movement (unless it's a Spike Lee Joint) portray racism as something in the past--the problem is completely solved by the last reel.  Even a good civil rights movie like Glory does this. Mississippi Burning is especially heinous, as it portrays J. Edgar Hoover's FBI as the heroes of the civil rights movement.  It also shows the struggle as one between white men--white FBI agents versus white local officials.  African-Americans are literally mute in this movie about their own plight, having been cowed into submission by the local white establishment.  (It never even occurs to the FBI agents that the reason that the black populace won't talk to them is not that they're afraid of the KKK, but that they don't trust the freaking FBI, and they have good reasons not to.)

  Sorry for the rant, but that's one of the problems Democrats face when talking about issues of civil rights.  The majority of white America thinks that racism is over--and one of the reasons they believe this is that Hollywood is telling them that every chance they get.

  by LeftCoastTimm on Fri Jan 07, 2005 at 02:40:02 AM PDT

  •  I hear you.

    But movies dramatize and romanticize to engage the viewer.  That's story telling, whatever it's form.  

    I should make clear that I viewed the movie and was stunned by how little time had passed from when murder was, if not an acceptable form of voter suppression, was tolerable to America at large.

    What happened in 2000 and even more viciously in 2004, was the institutionalized, socially acceptable  
    version of preventing the "undesirables" from voting.

    by 2lucky on Fri Jan 07, 2005 at 03:25:53 AM PDT

•  The Today Show

  I saw the Today show talking about this, and yet nowhere in the show have they mentioned one word about the debate yesterday.  I'm getting ready to write a letter(s) to email around, weaving the current voting travesties into the reporting of this arrest 40 years after the fact.  If they don't see fit to make a correlation then we'll have to make it for them.  I'm going to encourage our senators to follow through on their speeches yesterday and I'm going to encourage the media outlets to do stories on how far we've come, or haven't come, since the civil rights movement and to investigate instances of voter intimidation still taking place today.  Voter disenfranchisement/suppression is alive and well, as well as plenty of other serious problems detrimental to our democracy.  If they won't report on them at face value then we'll have to find ways to tie them into stories they are doing and/or would find "interesting" enough to report.  We need to keep these things in the open in any way that we can so that when any election reform legislation does indeed get introduced, it's already in the public psyche, even if it's just subliminal as a result of this story, or any other we can relate to insuring the integrity of the vote in any/every election.

  by abbysomething on Fri Jan 07, 2005 at 06:00:22 AM PDT