MISSISSIPPI BURNING

In 1964, two white New Yorkers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, journeyed to Neshoba County, Mississippi, to participate in Freedom Summer, a civil rights and voter registration effort, where they met James Chaney, a local African-American activist. On 21 June, they were detained in the Neshoba County Jail on a trumped-up speeding charge. About seven hours later, the three were released, only to be stopped again by the local deputy sheriff, who then turned the young men over to a group of Klan members. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwener were executed and their bodies buried in a dam under construction in a remote part of the county.

The 1988 film Mississippi Burning was based on this incident and the FBI investigation that followed. The film was directed by Alan Parker and starred Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as two FBI agents sent to fictional Jessup County to solve the case of the three missing civil rights workers. A disclaimer shown at the end of the movie announces that it was inspired by actual events which took place in the South during the 1960s. The characters however are sort of fictitious and do not depict the real people, either living or dead.

The bystander effect, a controversial name given to a social psychological phenomenon in cases where individuals do not offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present, is present in the movie Mississippi Burning. The killing of the civil rights workers doesn’t create public outcry of any kind in the South region. Very few black people, especially in Mississippi, had anything to say about the crime, as they didn’t dare to incur the wrath of the white authorities. But the truly astonishing aspect is the absence of the outcry by many white people, if any, as they either agreed with the crime, or just didn’t care about the plight of Blacks (and the Jews) in South.

One of the manners we are affected by groups is to consider crowd behaviour. Studies have shown that those in uniform behave differently. This is called being deindividuated. In this state you might do bad things ‘out of character’. Mississippi Burning is a film about the scapegoating of Black people in the southern USA. Those who were lynching and torturing the Blacks were disguised in uniforms and during the day the torturers had normal jobs, and behaved normally. This film is not very pleasant but well worth watching. One of the causes of prejudice is scapegoating in times of economic hardship, and the failure of cotton crops was just such a time (Hovland & Sears, 1940). So films like this can be of great relevance when studying psychology.