Mississippi Burning or a lesson I started to learn at age 13

I think anyone who reads what I write with any regularity knows I have a love of history.  Indeed, if you pay close attention, you might appreciate how emotional history makes me.  I often reflect on things that happened on the date in which I am currently drawing breath and speculate at what energy still hangs in our earthly air from those significant moments of human existence.

Today is the day after a day I promised myself to think upon.  I confess I used yesterday to prepare, cook, and entertain for a dinner party of a much frothier theme.  So I cast aside the half century anniversary of an event in American history that has always given me pause.

I am sad to say my attention to it was because of a Hollywood film.  Although I recently watched it again (before Netflix took it out of rotation) and marveled at the boldness of the story so soon after it happened and so unfiltered without concerns of the Faux News outrage machine.  I had a habit in junior high of watching the tapes my parents rented from Rutland Video each Saturday multiple times.  Maybe that was my way of getting every penny out of the $2.50 fee because a Saturday rental meant you had it an extra free day of Sunday.  I remember (what on earth did my parents think of this?) watching Mississippi Burning multiple times before we returned it to the store.

 (I cry even more at this clip now)

That was 1989.  I was still a typical oblivious teenager for the most part.  Definitely a goody two shoes, but unconcerned with the problems of the world outside my cozy middle class family life.  But for some reason the story of segregation in the South when my parents were my age… and the subsequent fight to put it to right… fascinated me.

Maybe fascinate is the wrong word.  Mostly it makes my heart hurt.  But not that heart hurt that makes me want to curl up in a ball and hide from the world.  The heart hurt that a child feels … a need to understand why… a need to unravel the pieces so it can be put back together in a better way.

Very shortly after that film, NBC produced a television movie about the people who were killed.  The fact it featured the guy who played Amadeus (Tom Hulce) and the lawyer from LA Law (Blair Underwood) and the girl from Dirty Dancing (Jennifer Grey) were only bonuses.  I taped that one.  I watched it a lot.  I thought… and didn’t think… about if I were a college student that summer of 1964… would I do what they did?  Then I wouldn’t admit to myself I wouldn’t have the courage because I liked that oblivious middle class world.  Now I like to think my answer would be different.  Of course, it is different because I don’t have to make that choice.

Instead I make my choice to bring up the conversation.  About race.  Except the only consequence I face is rolled eyes or the awkward silence at my dinner table or someone blocking my posts on Facebook.  I don’t have to worry about being chased down a road in Mississippi for speaking my opinion.  Some might declare that progress.  I agree.   Kind of.  Mostly not.  I think that notion of progress is another version of a teenage bubble of self-satisfied middle class oblivion.

Those young men went to the south to help register votes – among many other things.  But anyone who reads the news knows we have taken a huge step backward in terms of voting rights.  Mostly in the south.  Does that qualify as progress?  Could I look at Micki Shwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman today and say, yes, what happened to you was worth it because it is so much better today?  Could I look at their families and qualify their loss as a payment in the betterment of American society?

No.

The very fact I fear the eye roll or the Facebook block or the… awkward silence with my friends to mention the question of race as a problem of present day society validates that so very much.

But… this reflection on fifty years isn’t about me.  It isn’t about my discomfort.  My cowardice or the perception of marginal bravery to approach a topic.  It is about saying I remember those young men.  I have thought about them since I was 13 years old.  And I still question like the child I was still very much in 1989… how can I take those broken pieces of humanity and put them together?