http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-neshoba-20100910,0,289814.story
The documentary on the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964
provides not just a chilling glimpse of the time's virulent racism
but also the impressive strides that have been made.
By Kenneth Turan
September 10, 2010
"Neshoba" is a troubling documentary, a film about fiery passions and
murderous deeds that is disturbing in ways that go beyond what might
be expected.
Neshoba is a county in Mississippi where, on a June night in 1964,
one of the events that defined the struggle for racial equality in
the South took place. A trio of civil rights workers James Chaney,
Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by members of
the Ku Klux Klan, their bodies found days later, buried in an earthen
dam and exhibiting signs of torture and premature burial.
Initially, part of the reason significant national media attention
focused on these murders is because two of the victims, Goodman and
Schwerner, were white males from the North. As widow Rita Schwerner
says, some mothers' sons mattered more than others.
But gradually this case, which was baldly overdramatized in the
Oscar-winning "Mississippi Burning," became notorious for another
reason. For 40 years the state of Mississippi refused to bring murder
charges against the men investigations had shown were involved in the deaths.
Because of the state's refusal, the federal government was reduced to
indicting 18 men on the charge of violating the victims' civil
rights. Seven were found guilty in 1967, serving between two and six
years in prison.
The first part of "Neshoba" takes us back to those tumultuous times,
partly through newsreels and partly through contemporary interviews
with relatives of the murdered men, including Goodman's indomitable
88-year-old mother Carolyn.
This initial section forcefully reminds us of two things that are
easily forgotten, starting with the heartbreaking idealism of the
youthful civil rights workers (something also on display in Stanley
Nelson's exceptional "Freedom Riders"). Since the '60s are often
derided as an era of personal excess, it's important to remember the
other side.
The other point made by newsreel footage is how savage and virulent
the hatred of African Americans was at the time. Truly the inflated
rhetoric of today's haters has nothing on the venom that went out on
the airwaves in that tumultuous era.
But the reason "Neshoba" exists is not only to rehash history but
also to focus on some remarkable modern developments, starting with
the work of the Philadelphia Coalition, named after the city that is
Neshoba's county seat.
Made up of involved citizens of both races and including people with
personal ties to the 1960s events, the Coalition was determined to
seek closure for those terrifying days by righting old wrongs and
seeking murder indictments. Their passion for justice, their desire
to end the generations of guilt so impressed Jim Hood, the state's
attorney general, that he convened a grand jury to look into the case.
Ben Chaney, James Chaney's younger brother, asked filmmakers Micki
Dickoff and Tony Pagano to get involved in documenting this story,
and they did more than that. Taking more than 20 trips to
Mississippi, they did an unusually thorough job of interviewing,
talking not only to relatives but townspeople of all political persuasions.
The result is a rich and detailed picture of the particular culture
of this particular part of the South, where for every person who
wanted truth and reconciliation, someone else would insist Northern
troublemakers got what they were looking for and advise that it was
best to let sleeping dogs lie.
The key person the filmmakers talked to in Mississippi was
80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen, generally considered to be the
mastermind of the murder plot. The filmmakers had extensive
interviews with Killen over a five-month period, providing an unusual
window into the thought processes of an old-school unreconstructed racist.
Though eight of the 18 people brought to trial by the FBI are still
alive, Killen turned out to be the only man indicted by the state of
Mississippi. While that heartened some friends and family of the
victims, it left others dissatisfied. Viewing Killen as a sacrificial
lamb, they said it was a mockery of justice to leave the other guilty
parties unindicted.
"Neshoba's" strength is its clear-eyed picture of a situation that is
far from simple and still not completely resolved. Also, like "The
Tillman Story," it displays the worst and best of America, the racism
that will not die and the passionately concerned citizens who come
together and effect significant change.
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