Mississippi Burning: Ku Klux Klan vs. FBI - Movie Review Example

One agent-Ward-is young but has risen in the hierarchy by rigidly following protocol. The other-Anderson-is a former small-town Mississippi sheriff who joined the FBI late in life. This movie is not factual but is instead a story suggested by the facts ("Mississippi Burning": The Movie, 1988). The movie shows the FBI as ultimately using the illegal vigilante terror tactics of the Ku Klux Klan against the Klan itself. Also, in the movie, the FBI was given all the credit for carrying the civil rights banner, with no credit acknowledged for Dr.

Martin Luther King's moral policy of non-violence and the organized coalitions of blacks and whites under his banner. One reviewer noted that the campaign to find the missing workers was directed by J. Edgar Hoover, and it was known that he despised blacks. In fact, he was more involved in an effort to prove that Dr. King was a communist. The movie offered stereotypical portraits of black citizens and white terrorists, and the FBI agents ultimately used the same tactics as the Klan to solve the crime, with one death as the result.

Any act committed within the jurisdiction of the United States that is dangerous to human life and becomes a violation of the criminal laws of a state or of the United States is considered domestic terrorism (U.S. Code, 2006). It, therefore, can be said that the tactics used by both sides constituted domestic terrorism. Confederacy in the South continued to be rampant in 1964, even though the Civil War had ended 100 years earlier, and many southerners still refused to accept efforts to unite the country.

Mississippians, and especially small town Mississippians, were convinced that blacks had no rights and anyone involved with them was a "nigger lover" or a communist. Douglas Linder's detailed account of the "Mississippi Burning" trial-U.S. vs. Cecil Price et al-held in 1967 (2007) shows a photograph of defendants Sheriff Cecil Price and Sheriff Lawrence Rainey smirking and chewing tobacco that immediately brings to mind "southern red necks," and makes it easy to accept the Ku Klux Klan stereotype of ignorant racists.

In Mississippi in 1964, there was no federal police force, and protection was the responsibility of the local police. When three civil rights workers__two white and one black-disappeared in east-central Mississippi in June 1964, the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol and the FBI were notified, and a search took place (Linder, 2002). It was discovered that the three men had been stopped by the local police and taken to jail. The following day, they were released, but they were not seen again. When the federal agents, who had been called into the situation, were unable to find the young men after 24 hours, a full kidnap investigation was initiated by the Justice Department under the "Lindbergh Law.

" The younger agent, Ward, called in many workers to help find the boys. While the movie showed the Ku Klux Klan as responsible for the deaths of the three students, in actuality it could be said, according to Linder, "In spirit, everyone belonged to the Klan" (2002, p. 6).