Review of Neshoba (2010) by Edith N — 08 Jun 2012

It's Only History When It's Over.

It's easy to say "let sleeping dogs lie" when it isn't your issue. The people who say that in this movie, I think, are people for whom civil rights have never been an issue. They have never needed anyone to fight for their right to vote, to live where they like, to do the job they like, to go to school or send their children to school where they like. They have never woken in the night afraid that their sons have been killed for looking at a woman. It wasn't their son, their brother, their husband who was buried alive in an earthen dam and then accused of staging his disappearance as a publicity stunt. And, yes, it's true that nothing we do now will bring back the dead. But nothing we did at the time would have, either. "Nothing will bring back the dead" is not a reason to fail to prosecute, because that isn't the point of prosecution. Actions must have consequences, however long it takes.

Of course, we all know the story, because it's been made into three fictional movies so far. On 21 June, 1964, Michael Schwermer, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were murdered by a large group of men from Neshoba County, Mississippi. The FBI investigated, and eventually, the bodies of the three men were found in an earthen dam. Some of their killers were prosecuted on the charge of violating the men's civil rights, but no murder charges were ever filed. At least, not until 2005. On 6 January, 2005, a grand jury indicted Edgar Ray Killen for the murders of the three men. Neshoba County was divided on the subject, with many residents thinking that Killen was old (eighty), hadn't actually killed anyone, and had "suffered enough." This documentary interviews the surviving families of the three men, Killen himself, and a whole range of other people in and around Neshoba County.

I'm not entirely clear on how anyone thinks he's suffered. He's still a respected member of his community. He's married to a woman completely devoted to him. He not only fails to accept responsibility for his actions but his appeal was based on the fact that no jury of his peers would have convicted him in 1964. While almost certainly true, it's also generally considered to be a bad thing that you could have gotten away with murdering people in those days provided everyone's politics and skin colour lined up properly. I don't see any evidence that he's suffered at all. I mean, I'm willing to be convinced I guess, but you'd really have to work at it. And if he's being eaten up inside by what he did, he might consider sharing that with the rest of us; I'm sure the families would take some comfort from that fact. Instead, he is shown ranting about the Jews and how civil rights workers were trained to rape a woman a week.

It is probably true that the filmmakers know that crazy racists make for better drama. You get the guy who goes on about how all civil rights workers should have ended up in that dam, because they were sticking their noses in where they weren't wanted. After all, "their" blacks were perfectly content before people liked Schwermer and Chaney came around agitating. (The fact that James Chaney was from Mississippi is presumably attributable to his being brainwashed by the New York Jews.) All those people who say that blacks can't want what they've never had? Delightful. Great film. How representative are they of the "real" Mississippi? Well, in 1989, Congress passed a non-binding resolution honouring the three victims. The Mississippi delegation refused to vote for it, despite its being pretty noncontroversial by then. Attitudes change but slowly, it seems, because one of those men was Trent Lott, who kept getting voted back into office until he resigned.

Actually, one of my friends from college did Teach for America in rural Mississippi, and we used to joke that it made him an outside Jew agitator. There is still an attitude that places like Philadelphia, Mississippi, operate in a separate realm from the rest of the United States. People don't have a right to impose their values on that community. Famously, Ronald Reagan gave a speech at the Neshoba County Fairgrounds in 1980 in which he used the term "states' rights." While he might not have meant the coded racism a lot of people took from it, it's hard to deny that it at least showed insensitivity to history. When applying for scholarships for Graham, one of the search engines I used asked if he is descended from a Confederate veteran. The South cannot move away from the legacy of men such as Edgar Ray Killen until that question is never relevant.