Although overshadowed by subsequent examinations of racial oppression in the United States, Mississippi Burning is worth watching today because of its peculiar datedness.
On the one hand, the film was sufficiently distant from the time and place it depicts, the segregated Mississippi of 1964, to feel like ancient history. By 1988, mainstream American media had largely succeeded in transforming the heat of the Civil Rights Movement into a self-congratulatory light that made white Americans proud of how far their nation had come. And the rural Deep South of liberal stereotypes had become a wasteland, its infrastructure decaying and most of its middle-class population gone for greener economic pastures.
On the other hand, Mississippi Burning came out as the Cold War was waning, when the nation’s priorities were shifting. For decades, mainstream American media had sought to counter negative stereotypes promoted by the Soviet Union and its satellites. Now that pressure was easing, opening the door to less defensiveness about the legacy of structural discrimination against people of colour.
Because Mississippi Burning reflects this turning point so clearly, it is helpful for understanding how the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement eventually migrated from hushed private conversations to the White House.
The film’s depiction of the conflict between federal authorities and their local counterparts also illuminates current tensions in the United States, with the Trump Administration’s use of ICE to target metropolitan areas like Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles, which it perceives as hotbeds of “treasonous” resistance to its political agenda.
In the wake of Mississippi Burning’s theatrical release, civil rights activists took issue with its screenplay. By centring the story on white FBI agents, they argued, the film reduces people of colour to glorified plot devices. We see their suffering, but not their strength.
While this would have been a problem if the story had been entirely fictional, the fact that it draws heavily on the historical record makes matters worse.
Mississippi Burning takes place in 1964, during “Freedom Summer,” when local organisers teamed up with volunteers from the north in hopes of registering people of colour to vote.
Although African-American men had technically held the right to vote since 1870, African-American women since 1920, and Native Americans since 1924, exercising that right was perilously difficult within former slave states like Mississippi.
Racial segregation was enforced through so-called “Jim Crow” laws passed following the Civil War, legitimised by the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that “separate but equal” treatment did not violate the Constitution. In truth, separate was never truly equal, with whites enjoying access to superior public services.
People of colour were discouraged from even registering to vote by political literacy tests and poll taxes, not to mention acts of terrorism by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Mississippi Burning tells the story of two FBI agents Rupert Anderson (Gene Hackman) and Alan Ward (Willem Dafoe) sent to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers.
Although names have been changed for legal reasons, the plot hews closely to the real-life FBI case, code name MIBURN, that ultimately uncovered the murder of James Chaney, a Black man, and his white companions from up north, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
When Anderson and Ward arrive in the fictional Jessup County, their efforts to locate the missing men are stonewalled by local law enforcement. There is palpable hostility towards them. Even Black residents of the area eye them with suspicion, knowing that the investigation will subject them to dangerous scrutiny by the white establishment.
After the idealistic Ward decides to sit down next to a Black man in a segregated restaurant and ask him questions, that man is abducted and beaten, even though he refuses to answer.
As the story progresses, this pattern of intimidation is repeated several times, with increasingly dire consequences. The hotel where Anderson and Ward are staying is attacked. Blacks who are suspected of talking with them are punished. Then one Black man, who refuses to flee when his barn is set on fire, is lynched.
We don’t just hear about the violent behaviour of the white supremacists who control Jessup County. We see gruesome evidence of it, over and over.
Mississippi Burning keeps ramping up the tension. A mounting sense of dread permeates even outwardly innocent encounters. And the film pulls no punches.
The score is compelling. The plot is tightly woven. The cinematography is outstanding. Even the mise-en-scène, often gotten wrong by historical dramas, holds its own. And the acting is even better, with Gene Hackman delivering one of the best performances in a career packed with excellent ones.
That’s why it may be surprising for contemporary audiences, particularly outside the United States, to learn that civil rights activists sharply criticised Mississippi Burning in the wake of its theatrical release.
The biggest problem is that the filmmakers consistently prioritised “good storytelling” over other concerns. While the film presents the specific case accurately, including some shots nearly identical to news footage from 1964, it distorts the big picture.
By focusing primarily on white people in a story about the Civil Rights Movement, Mississippi Burning ends up perpetuating the narrative segregation for which Hollywood was already being excoriated during the time when the story takes place.
While criticism of Mississippi Burning’s white-centred story would have made sense under any circumstances, the fact that it is told from the FBI’s perspective gave it a sharper edge.
The FBI’s founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, wasn’t just a fanatical anti-communist, as Rupert Anderson mentions in the film, but clearly harboured racist views himself, as his persecution of civil rights leaders like Dr Martin Luther King Junior made clear.
Even if some FBI agents really were as idealistic as Alan Ward, seeking justice for victims of white supremacy, the Bureau’s battles with local law enforcement in the Deep South had more to do with structural antagonism between the US government and states eager to preserve a measure of autonomy.
The case of Medgar Evers is instructive. As field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in Mississippi, he worked tirelessly to register Black voters, making him a target for the state’s white extremists.
In the 1987 public television documentary Eyes on the Prize episode focusing on Mississippi, Evers’ widow, Myrlie, explains how the stress of his position affected their marriage.
“I used to try to reassure him and tell him, ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you. The FBI is here.” At this point, she rolls her eyes and says, “Laugh. Umm, ‘Everybody knows you. You’re in the press. They wouldn’t dare do anything to you.’” But they did.
Although Evers was supposedly under the protection of both the FBI and local police, who had been following him around, he was all alone on the night of his assassination on 12 June, 1963. This implies a set-up for which the Bureau bears responsibility, whether through sheer negligence or more active complicity.
The reason civil rights activists took issue with Mississippi Burning in 1988 wasn’t just that its screenplay marginalised the African-American experience, but that it did so while lionising the FBI in the process.
What these critics of Mississippi Burning, outraged by the whitewashing of history, missed is the film’s ambivalence towards the FBI.
Early in the film, Alan Ward stands for everything noble about the Bureau’s work in the state. When his new partner, Rupert Anderson, suggests that he has been picked to lead their team because of his academic credentials or Washington connections, Ward informs him that he has on-the-ground experience, having helped protect James Meredith, the first African-American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, who faced many death threats.
This is an especially important detail for knowledgeable viewers, since they will likely be aware that Medgar Evers led the crusade to desegregate that institution.
Over time, however, it becomes apparent that Ward’s idealism is not enough to get the job done. After an attack is made on the motel where he and Anderson are staying, he decides to call in reinforcements. Soon, he orders his assistant to buy the movie theatre where the FBI sets up shop and the motel where they are staying. Then he demands that hundreds of military personnel be brought in to help search a swamp for the missing men’s bodies.
The message to local officials who are trying to stonewall the FBI’s efforts is clear. No matter how forcefully they resist, the American government will ultimately outspend them by a vast margin, grinding out an endgame as long as it takes.
While this is undoubtedly true, Anderson points out to his superior that taking this approach will make their task harder. The film strongly encourages us to perceive the wisdom in this analysis. The older man’s experience in the region—he is a native Mississippian who was himself a small-town sheriff before joining the Bureau—trumps Ward’s determination to get results through brute force.
In the end, it is Anderson’s solitary, “embedded” detective work that secures the crucial tip in the case. Because he perceives nuances in the white community that Ward is too much of an outsider to see, he is able to exploit the tensions within it for the FBI’s benefit.
By the end of the film, Ward has transformed from someone whose every move is dictated by standard Bureau procedure into a more flexible leader who is willing to countenance the use of deeply problematic means—abducting the mayor and impersonating the Ku Klux Klan—to beat his enemies at their own game.
This is where things get complicated.
Presumably, those who found fault with Mississippi Burning for representing the FBI in such a positive light would welcome this dose of realism. There were enough incidents in the Bureau’s history during the 1960s to indicate that adopting the techniques of extremists was uncomfortably on-brand.
The problem is that Anderson’s attentiveness to local concerns—he explains to Ward that everyone in the community, regardless of their politics or skin colour, is suspicious of the Feds—is mirrored by the film itself.
Mississippi Burning viscerally demonstrates the impact of white-supremacist terrorism, showing again and again how any Black person who steps out of line risks being beaten or worse. And we repeatedly see members of the African-American community refusing to cooperate with the investigation out of fear of reprisal.
But because that reluctance to speak goes hand in hand with an impulse to make proper movie villains of Jessup County’s white establishment, a divide opens up between what the film’s cinematography and soundtrack are doing and what its screenplay contains.
In short, Mississippi Burning ends up reproducing the very racial dynamic it supposedly wants to combat. Black voices are silenced, while the worst white ones get to speak at length.
Part of the reason is that the film documents the role that national media played during Freedom Summer, which locals perceived as a second “invasion” of the state, reinforcing Washington’s assault on Mississippi institutions. We see both local leaders and ordinary members of the community being interviewed.
The most important example is when reporters give Clayton Townley, a local businessman we know to be a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan, the opportunity to make a case for his beliefs.
After insisting that he is just a businessman, Townley states, “I’m also a Mississippian. And an American. And I am getting sick and tired of the way many of us Mississippians are having our views distorted by you newspaper people and on the TV.”
The screenplay could have stopped there, making it clear that local leaders were pushing back vigorously against both the “northern” media and the FBI’s presence. But Townley keeps talking.
“So let’s get this straight,” he declares. “We do not accept Jews, because they reject Christ. And their control of the international banking cartels is at the root of what we call Communism today.”
While the awfulness of this statement might have been self-evident to people working within the film industry, much of the United States—whether in 1964, 1988, or 2026—regards Hollywood with suspicion bordering on hostility. Even if the point of letting Townley explain his political convictions in detail was to discredit his ideology, there was no guarantee that audiences would respond to his polemical statements the way the filmmakers intended.
Townley continues.
“We do not accept Papists, because they bow to a Roman dictator. We do not accept Turks, Tatars, Mongols, Orientals, nor Negroes, because we’re here to protect Anglo-Saxon democracy and the American way.”
The scariest thing about hearing this statement today is that it no longer represents an extremist worldview in American society.
The people who made Mississippi Burning likely regarded Townley’s sentiments as a thing of the past, the last words of a dying culture, trampled flat by the march of progress.
From an ideological perspective, the 1988 of Hollywood now feels a lot farther away than Mississippi in 1964.
Numerous people in MAGA circles, right up to President Trump’s cabinet, have openly shared beliefs that differ from Townley’s in manner of expression more than actual substance.
That’s why the United States has become a mirror image of its Cold War identity, with the US government actively seeking to promote racial division and liberal communities and their leaders now in the same structural position occupied by Mississippi in 1964.
The people of cities like Minneapolis must now defend the culture they value locally against the Trump Administration’s relentless push to “make America great again” by putting women and minorities in their place and permitting white men to rule the land with impunity. The way they did before the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, and gay and lesbian activists began to challenge their authority.
Mississippi Burning certainly wasn’t trying to advance a proto-MAGA agenda. For all of the filmmakers’ missteps, they were sincere in their devotion to excoriating the virulent racism depicted in the film. And their handiwork did concrete good, inspiring investigative journalists and student volunteers to revisit 1960s cases in pursuit of justice.
But the film’s most important lesson, ironically, may have been that the end of the Cold War gave political reactionaries in the United States a new lease on life.
Photograph courtesy of Charlie Bertsch. All rights reserved.
