Show Business: Fire This Time

A visitor to our community finds an old-fashioned welcome and a degree of friendliness that exists in no other place . . . Numerous lakes and ponds offer fine year-around fishing, and for the hunter Neshoba County is a paradise.

-- Chamber of Commerce brochure, Neshoba County, Miss., 1964

Wasn't that a time? Each year of the early 1960s brought new images of heroism and horror as the civil rights movement spread through the South like kudzu. 1960: four Negro students sit in at a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter. 1961: the Congress of Racial Equality inaugurates its Freedom Rides to integrate Southern bus terminals. 1962: in Oxford, Miss., James Meredith enters Ole Miss, its first black student since Reconstruction.

And then, in 1963, the white arm of racism strikes back. May: Birmingham public-safety commissioner "Bull" Connor turns his dogs and his fire hoses on demonstrators. June: in Jackson, Miss., Medgar Evers is murdered. September: four black children are killed in a Birmingham church bombing. The following summer promised the climax to a melodrama that would be scored to either We Shall Overcome or Mississippi Goddam.

Or both. In 1964 Arthur Ashe won the U.S. Open, Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And on June 19 the U.S. Senate passed its landmark Civil Rights Bill. But two days later, three civil rights workers -- two Northern whites, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and a Southern black, James Chaney -- were arrested for speeding in Philadelphia, Miss., then jailed and later released into the night. They were never again seen alive.

For the next six weeks, FBI agents blanketed the area, quizzing the friendly folks of Neshoba County. Reporters from all over tested the residents' hospitality. Navy frogmen fished the lakes and ponds, searching for evidence of the local hunters' blood sport. In August, thanks to a $30,000 payoff to an informant, the FBI discovered the bodies in a new earth dam. Four months later, the Philadelphia sheriff, his deputy and 17 others were arrested, and in 1967 seven of the 19 (including the deputy but not his boss) were convicted of conspiracy to murder.

Triumph and heartbreak abound in this story, but it has taken Hollywood nearly a quarter-century to put it on the big screen. Now it is here with a bang. Mississippi Burning, Orion Pictures' $15 million drama about the FBI's search for the murderers of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, has arrived with critical trumpets leading the way and bitter controversy in its wake. It has already won National Board of Review citations for best picture, best actor (Gene Hackman) and best supporting actress (Frances McDormand) -- prizes the film may duplicate on Academy Award night. For Mississippi Burning is made to Oscar's order: a white-heat yarn that illuminates, with fiery rhetoric at a lightning pace, one crucial chapter in American history.