This is what we are up against - "Mississippi Burning"

[orangecrush]

WARNING - OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE AND RACIAL/GENDER SLURS...

to make a point.

Things really haven't changed much.

VOTER SUPPRESSION.

Killer racist cops and klan/militia.

Once again, the F.B.I. is bringing organized hate down.

We need more Gene Hackmans.

This is all they understand.

.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. Haven't seen this in a while but I feel like it took his character a bit to come around ...

His eventual enlightenment is a key plot point ... do I remember right?

[orangecrush]

2. In a way

It is largely differences between the 2 FBI agents, they reach an agreement.

[Doc Sportello]

3. Sorry but that movie was a distortion cof history

Hoover was a racist who had to be dragged into the crime by LBJ. There was no such character as portrayed by Hackman bullying his fellow Southerners into cooperating. They used money and the threat of jail to get help. Afterwards Hoover continued his vendetta against MLK and other civil rights leaders.

[orangecrush]

4. There were two agents assigned to the case

One was a Northerner, the other was a former Southern sheriff, who used tactics similar to Hackmans, iirc.

Been a while..

[Doc Sportello]

7. There were more than 150 agents and tough guy tactics did not break the case

The movie was heavily criticized at the time of its release for portraying the FBI as some kind of white knights, when Hoover would have probably left it alone if not for LBJ and the national outrage over the killings (of course two of the victims were white and for comparison when they started dredging waterways for the bodies they found several young black men who had been murdered and dumped without notice).

Here's a NYT article from a few years go:
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/04/movies/film-fact-vs-fiction-in-mississippi.html


Quote from it:
"screenwriter Chris Gerolmo and Mr. Parker graft considerable artistic fabrication, chiefly concerning the F.B.I.'s investigation of the case, and say it is essentially a ''work of fiction.''

and from the American Historical Association:

"the FBI broke the case with help from an informant who responded to a $30,000 reward, not through assistance from the wife of a deputy sheriff or from others who revealed what they knew after facing the FBI's own form of terror tactics."

and

"In dealing with the FBI's role in the case, Parker takes the film far from fact. ... It borrows ideas from the Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood films to argue that the extra-legal strategies of a virile FBI agent finally brought law and order to Mississippi. Furthermore, it suggests that the appearance of numerous FBI agents in Mississippi provoked the summer of arson, shootings and beatings when, in fact, the invasion of college students through the "Freedom Summer" project was the real provocation.

By taking this approach, Parker overlooks the political context of events and loses the most important message about the impact of the Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney murders. It was not violence by law enforcement agents that brought progress for civil rights but the American public's abhorrence for racial violence."

[orangecrush]

8. And the F.B.I. of today

Has rounded up hundreds of insurrectionists

And are rounding up more on a daily basis.

I agree Hoover was what he was.

[Doc Sportello]

10. Parker was a great filmmaker but that movie did a disservice to the real heroes

The true heroes were the civil rights workers and locals who suffered art the hands of the white supremacists. I wish Parker hadn't portrayed the FBI as the heroes but he did. Trying to compare tactics and heroes from a movie that got it wrong to what the FBI is doing today is wrong. I didn't say anything about the current FBI. I just want people to know the true story of Mississippi Burning because it was an important point in the civil rights movement. Holding that movie up as a corollary to what's going on now doesn't help.

[orangecrush]

12. I see your point.

Mine wasn't so much to compare yesterday's and today's F B.I., but to compare the corrupt police and klan/militia of then and now, which really have not changed, except now they have social media.

[byronius]

5. Dang, that was a bit of beauty there.

Poster above was somewhat correct -- J. Edgar Hoover was your standard American Nazi with a secret footlocker under his bed.

I'm right in the middle of reading 'Age Of Eisenhower' -- which talks at length about Hoover trying to draw a line between black activisim and communist infiltration. But there were dedicated agents that obeyed the code of the FBI more than their lunatic boss -- or Eisenhower's lukewarm half-ass dedication to civil rights.

Those civil servants make the difference between the United States being a third world shithole and a decent attempt at a diverse utopia. They probably saved us from Trump.

I find the funniest and worst part of all of this is that those 1950's anti-communist crusaders were just building a bogeyman to scare people into giving them power -- and that their modern counterparts all turned out to be the traitoriest traitors of all American traitordom, taking money and help from hostile foreign nations to cheat their way past elections they can't win. Ultra-ironic.

Martin Luther King once said this isn't a conflict between black and white, but between justice and injustice. The modern GOP is still at it -- pointing to BLM as the bogeyman while riding the tiger of truly traitorous terrorists: fascists who don't even believe in the basic concepts of this nation.

It's a great book, Age Of Eisenhower. Done riled me up.

[peppertree]

6. +1

That ain't ALL Hoover had under the bed.

[orangecrush]

9. Great post

Thank you.

[pressbox69]

11. The movie clip

may not have been the way things were, but hot damn, that's the way things should have been. Maybe that's the way things should be now. How about a national GRAB A RACIST BY HIS TALLY WACKER DAY! Somehow it's nice to see a racist good ol' boy fall to his knees in agony. Listen to him scream for mercy with that shrill high pitched noise those cream puff southern boys emit when the tables are turned on them. And it's an education for them because they will feel how it's going to be when the die and drop into hell where they belong. Only Lucifer and his demon klan will hold on forever and never let go. Some of them may even enjoy the experience after 50 or 60 thousand years, so be it.

[orangecrush]

13. I don't think it's a North vs. South thing so much

I think it is more a decent human vs willfully ignorant dangerous sociopath thing.

[pressbox69]

14. Yes

In other words, this is a North vs. South thing.

[orangecrush]

15. The good Democrats of Georgia

Saved the election.

They would beg to differ.