Copyright 1988 The Times Mirror Company

Los Angeles Times

December 13, 1988, Tuesday, Home Edition

SECTION: Metro; Part 2; Page 7; Column 1; Op-Ed Desk

LENGTH: 762 words

HEADLINE: HOLLYWOOD'S LATEST PERVERSION: THE CIVIL-RIGHTS ERA AS A

WHITE
EXPERIENCE

BYLINE: By CORETTA SCOTT KING, Coretta Scott King is the president of the Martin
Luther
King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

DATELINE: ATLANTA

BODY:
Alan Parker's film, "Mississippi Burning," now showing in several major cities, hasn't opened
here in the heart of the South as of this writing. By all accounts this powerful fictionalized
version of the investigation into the 1964 murder of three civil-rights workers near
Philadelphia, Miss., will be an Oscar contender.

Reportedly the film faithfully re-creates the palpable climate of violence and racism
surrounding Mississippi Summer, the civil-rights campaign that brought a new generation of
black and white student activists into the Deep South. Another generation has come of age
since 1964, and perhaps the film can do some good by showing them what the civil-rights
movement was up against. Some critics charge, however, that "Mississippi Burning" is just
another Hollywood whitewash of the black freedom struggle because it centers on the trials
and tribulations of white people (two FBI agents)on the periphery of the movement, while the
black civil-rights workers who made up the movement are non-existent or relegated to minor
roles. "Unless Hollywood cookie-cutters stop stamping out more films like 'Mississippi
Burning,'
civil-rights-era movies will not only be inaccurate, they'll reduce real-life black heroes to
pitiful
bit players in their own drama," explains USA Today editor Barbara Reynolds in her review
titled "Same Old Black Role: Pray, Hide and Sing."

Rep. Mike Espy, Mississippi's first black congressman since Reconstruction, agrees. "This
movie
showed no heroism, no activism, no blacks involved in their own determination."

"Mississippi Burning," which cost an estimated $14 million, apparently shares this flaw with a
spate of coming feature films that are set during the civil-rights movement, all of which focus
on crises of conscience that were faced by Southern or Northern whites during the 1950s and
'60s. "Heart of Dixie" centers on the changes that were experienced by three white women at
a fictitious Alabama college. "The Stick Wife" stars Jessica Lange as the wife of a Ku Klux
Klansman who took part in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth St. Baptist Church in
Birmingham, Ala., that claimed the lives of four black girls. "Into Selma" chronicles the
 experiences of a white student at a Northern college who joins the voting-rights struggle in
1965.

Many white people made courageous contributions to the civil-rights movement. Some --
including Viola Liuzzo, the Rev. James Reeb, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner --
lost
their lives in the struggle for equality (Goodman and Schwerner, along with a black man,
James Chaney, are the unnamed victims of "Mississippi Burning"). They are legitimate heroes
of
the civil-rights movement who traded the privileges of their race for "a season of suffering" for
justice and equality, and I would welcome films that told their stories.

But how long will we have to wait before Hollywood finds the courage and the integrity to tell
the stories of some of the many thousands of black men, women and children who put their
lives on the line for equality? How long will it be before black writers, producers, directors
and
actors are entrusted with the resources to make serious films about the black experience?

Although blacks purchase about $1.5 billion worth of movie tickets annually, there are no
full-time black producers of major motion pictures, and only 1.3% of the 7,000 members of
the
Writers Guild of America are black, few of whom are currently employed. At present, 80% of
movie and television writing jobs go to white males under the age of 40, according to a 1987
guild survey.

Given these statistics, it is understandable why Hollywood finds it hard to focus on the black
experience, particularly when the subject is the American civil-rights movement. But it is not
excusable.

Sidney Poitier, who probably has as much first-hand knowledge of racial discrimination in the
entertainment industry as anyone, has cited "rampant, inexcusable discriminatory practices
against minorities in motion pictures and television." He has called foran investigation into the
film and television industry and for legislation that provides guarantees of a fair and equitable
share of contracts for minority-owned production companies.

Meanwhile, I refer young people who want to get a more realistic understanding of the
civil-rights movement to their libraries. A good place to begin would be with Seth Cagin's and
Philip Dray's "We Are Not Afraid," which tells the true story of the martyred young men
whose
names were not mentioned in "Mississippi Burning."