I was 17 when I saw Mississippi Burning in a theater upon its release. The film came loaded as an Oscar contender with Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe in the lead roles of two FBI agents trying to uncover the disappearance of the “Mississippi Three” in 1964. The Mississippi Three were Civil Rights activists named James Chaney (who was black), Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner (both Jewish). They had traveled from Meridian, Mississippi, to Longdale, Mississippi, to meet with a congregation whose church had been burned to the ground by white supremacists. On June 21, 1964, they disappeared.
The FBI case was named Mississippi Burning, and the film used the file’s name for its own purposes. It’s one hell of a great name for a movie, and at the time I saw it, I thought it was one hell of a movie, too. I was far from the only one. The film received strong reviews, scored seven Oscar nominations (winning for cinematography), and did well at the box office.
As the film gained traction with viewers, critics, and Academy voters, there was a controversy around the film’s use of “artistic license” in telling the story. People from Coretta Scott King to the mother of Andrew Goodman took issue with the film’s fictionalization of events. I didn’t understand those criticisms then because of the film’s visceral impact on me.
There can be no mistaking that Mississippi Burning is a feverish work of skill. Director Alan Parker paced the film like a charged-up locomotive, the score by Trevor Jones is driven to the point of nerve-jangling, Hackman gives one of the best performances of his career as a liberal good ol’ boy, and Frances McDormand received her first Oscar nomination for playing the supporting role of a long-suffering racist deputy’s (Brad Dourif) wife. It’s easy to understand why Peter Biziou, the director of photography on the film, won the Oscar for cinematography. You can practically smell the mud mixed with animal shit through the screen. The film is nothing if not immediate.
It’s also one of the most wrong-headed films ever made.
Not so much because of the fast and loose way it plays with the facts of the case (as a fan of Oliver Stone’s JFK, that would be wildly contradictory), but because of the film’s single-minded perspective. Mississippi Burning is a film that purports to be a thriller about the Civil Rights Movement and this single case, which created a national outrage. The trouble is, there’s not a single significant black character in the film.

For the most part, the black characters in Mississippi Burning are nothing more than voiceless victims waiting for the white man to come and save them. Anyone who knows anything about the Civil Rights era knows that the southern Black churches were the spine of the movement, but there is almost no sense of that here. A couple of redneck racist references to Martin Luther King Jr. are the only oblique mentions that give you any sense that black people took any action in their own struggle. There is only one scene that showcases the fierce commitment of the church to its cause. Frankie Faison plays a preacher delivering the eulogy at James Chaney’s funeral. In a roaring stemwinder of a speech, a furious Faison speaks of how he can’t mourn the two murdered white boys along with Chaney because Chaney can’t even be buried next to his fellow white activists. The sequence is all too brief, but it does hint at a different, better version of Mississippi Burning that might have been possible.
Other than that moment, the only other black characters of any consequence are a young boy who is brave enough to speak out and a “specialist” that Hackman calls in to speed up the investigation. Hackman and Dafoe’s relationship is comparable to that of Sean Connery and Kevin Costner’s in The Untouchables, with Hackman and Connery playing the grizzled veterans who need to school the straightlaced idealists played by Dafoe and Costner in the harsher methods required to get the bad guys.
Dafoe’s role is more thankless than Hackman’s, but he makes something out of an underwritten character that is still a much more accurate depiction of a 1964 FBI agent than Hackman’s avenging angel. Hackman’s agent is a white liberal fantasy come to cinematic life. It’s to Hackman’s great credit that his skill and charisma paper over the logical shortcomings of his character.

In the film’s most memorable scene, Hackman puts a beating on Dourif’s deputy in a somehow midday empty barbershop that rivals the trash-canning that James Caan’s Sonny Corleone delivers to his brother-in-law in The Godfather. In both films, the reason for the beatdown is the same: the beating of a woman that Hackman and Caan’s characters care about. The key difference is that the likelihood of an FBI agent in that era performing such a violent act on an officer of the law is much more difficult to believe than that of Sonny’s mobster family-based wrath. Yet, as a scene in and of itself, the effectiveness of its manipulations is undeniable.
One of the many conundrums in the film is how well-shot and performed certain scenes are, even if there’s not a chance in hell that they did or could have happened. Take that “specialist” I referred to earlier: as played by Badja Djola, he’s a mysterious black man with some connection to Hackman and the FBI. Mississippi Burning shows the town’s mayor (R. Lee Ermey) being kidnapped by FBI agents, tied to a chair in a shack, with his mouth covered by tape. In walks the “specialist” who tells the mayor the story of a black boy who was abducted and castrated by young white men. As Djola recounts the story, he mentions that the crime took place in a shack “much like this one,” with a regular razor blade “much like this one,” and that his testicles were dropped into a cup “much like this one.” It’s a chilling sequence with a palpable sense of dread and potential horror hanging over it. Of course, Djola’s “specialist” walks out of the shack with all the information he demands. The scene is ridiculous if you give it even a moment of thought, but again, I’ll be damned if it doesn’t play on its own micro terms.
What’s doubly strange about Mississippi Burning is how easy it is to consider a much more successful film about mismatched partners attempting to solve a crime in the deep racist south of Mississippi. You don’t even have to imagine one. It existed well before Mississippi Burning debuted: 1967’s In The Heat Of The Night (directed by Norman Jewison). Of course, one huge difference separates the film, and it’s not the 21-year difference in the release date: one of those characters is played by Sidney Poitier, an actual black man. Poitier’s Detective Virgil Tibbs is a man of agency and action. While it wouldn’t have made sense for either of Hackman or Dafoe’s characters to be black and leading an investigation of such significance in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, could there not have been a black character in the film who represented the people who were most affected by segregation, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan?
There are moments in the film where it does get the feel of the dark underbelly hidden behind southern hospitality. The casual, open racism of southern whites being interviewed by a news crew in the film resonates strongly with my own experience as a child in Kentucky. Several of those interviewees say they believe the whole ordeal is a hoax. A word that has never gone out of style for those who are well-practiced at denying the truth.
Mid-film, McDormand asks Hackman a salient question: Would the FBI be down here if two of the missing “boys” weren’t white? Hackman knows the answer as well as she does, even if neither of them answers it aloud.
While those scenes may ring with the sound of the truth, they cannot make up for the lack of a black protagonist. I was discussing Mississippi Burning with ESPN Sportswriter Howard Bryant who said, “You have to ask yourself who is this movie being made by and for? Because it sure isn’t us (black people).” That discussion made me wonder why a film made more than two decades after In The Heat Of The Night would be less bold while covering similar territory. There were almost no films made for and about black people before 1960. The ‘60s had the occasional exception. Michael Roemer’s Nothing But A Man and Melvin Van Peebles’ The Story of a Three-Day Pass come to mind, but both films suffered from poor distribution, and even in the current streaming era, they are challenging to find.
The “blaxploitation” era of the ‘70s proved that there was an audience for films about people of color. Crime dramas like Shaft and Superfly made significant sums of money, as did comedies like Car Wash. With this proof through attendance, one might have thought that the ‘80s would have opened up a new era of black cinema. Instead, we saw the studios rewriting history during the Reagan years with the “white savior” narrative that centered black stories around the heroism of a white man.
While the white savior movie didn’t begin with Mississippi Burning, the film is one of the most belligerent versions of the trope. The fact that it is technically so well made cannot cover up the multitude of cinematic sins the film committed. Of course, the success of Mississippi Burning and films that shared its complex led to more of them. Amistad, The Blind Side, and Green Book are just three notable films on a seemingly endless list.
As Howard told me, “These are films made by white people to make them feel better about themselves.” If you pay close attention to these movies that take the subject matter of black people and have a white character playing the lead, you can practically hear them scream, “See! We aren’t all bad!” It’s a much easier choice than dealing with the truth.
Hell, on the night the Mississippi three were murdered and their bodies hidden, James Chaney was the driver of the car on that grim evening. Mississippi Burning puts Chaney in the backseat. Black people have rarely been in charge of their own story. Mississippi Burning couldn’t even let a black man be in charge of the car, even though history had made it clear that he was behind the wheel.
Until Spike Lee came along in the mid-80s, you’d be hard-pressed to find a director of color who was given the opportunity to make as many as a handful of meaningful films about people of color. There’s some irony in that Spike had his breakthrough with Do The Right Thing one year after Mississippi Burning came out. Three years later, he became the first black director to helm a major historical epic about a black icon with his towering biopic Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington. Spike Lee was (and is) a one-man revolution who didn’t kick down the door so much; he built his own house—living room, kitchen, door, and all.
Lee was asked about Mississippi Burning back in ‘88. His fine film School Daze, about life on a black college campus, came out that same year. Lee said of Mississippi Burning, “It messed up my mind how white people tell our stories and rewrite history like we weren’t even there.”
Cinematic history is full of films that are disingenuous about their subject—particularly if the subject is race. Some of them are well-made and even well-meaning. Mississippi Burning is one of those films. For all the skill that went into the making and for whatever intentions were behind its making, the perspective is so skewed that, in the end, it’s effectively white-race propaganda.