A Long, Hot Summer in Mississippi That Still Burns
“Neshoba: The Price of Freedom,” a documentary by Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano, focuses on one of the most notorious and terrible incidents of the 1960s and on its long aftermath....
But the dramatic heart of the film consists of scenes that, in plain moviegoing terms, transform “Neshoba” from an earnest courtroom chronicle into something much more fascinating and troubling. These are interviews with Mr. Killen himself. A member of the Philadelphia Coalition observes that a lot of white Southerners who hold racist views tend, nowadays, to express them “in code.” Mr. Killen is not one of them. His passionate defense of segregation is startling now, though it would have been unremarkable in 1964.
“I’m not a Jew hater,” he says at one point, after having explained how Jews and Communists control the media, and he is unguarded and outspoken in defending his loathing for the “outsiders” and local troublemakers who threatened his Christian, racially pure way of life 40 years ago....
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But the dramatic heart of the film consists of scenes that, in plain moviegoing terms, transform “Neshoba” from an earnest courtroom chronicle into something much more fascinating and troubling. These are interviews with Mr. Killen himself. A member of the Philadelphia Coalition observes that a lot of white Southerners who hold racist views tend, nowadays, to express them “in code.” Mr. Killen is not one of them. His passionate defense of segregation is startling now, though it would have been unremarkable in 1964.
“I’m not a Jew hater,” he says at one point, after having explained how Jews and Communists control the media, and he is unguarded and outspoken in defending his loathing for the “outsiders” and local troublemakers who threatened his Christian, racially pure way of life 40 years ago....