5 Civil Rights Movies That Are Great (And 5 That Are Offensively Awful)

1. Mississippi Burning (1988)

Mississippi Burning is unfortunately the 1980s equivalent of D.W Griffith€™s 1915 racist masterpiece Birth of a Nation. The spirit of the film, and the inversions of the characters are so grossly incorrect and misleading, that much like with Griffith€™s KKK propaganda piece, Mississippi Burning elevates real life antagonists to the position of being heroes, while depicting African American themselves as being passive victims, and even in some case the antagonists. In the film three Civil Rights workers are murdered in Mississippi, so the FBI sends two of its agents in to catch the killers. The town, being incredibly racist, does not want to help, but through their cunning and insatiable desire to get to the truth the two FBI agents get to the bottom of the crime, and everyone lives happily ever after. Now this might seem like pretty standard fare, but there is one particularly glaring problem with the narrative being presented €“ the FBI were largely complicit in covering up racial murders in the area before this and were not helpful at all. It was the work of activists (who are cut out from the film almost entirely) that helped actually bring a shred of integrity to their investigations - yet in the film this is never even slightly touched upon There is too much to write about everything that is wrong about Mississippi Burning, but needless to say it is the ultimate example of reframing African American self-determination and desire to find justice, through the eyes of white protagonists that in reality were not very helpful at all. It would be one thing if the African American actors were simply missing from the story €“ but the implication that the Federal Government and the FBI was a liberal bastion of pioneering human rights focused investigators is unforgivably misleading as this was just not even slightly the case at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUtlJwfNEtI