On the wrong side of history
By John Esther
Plagued with its own shameful history of racism, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, likes to play pretend and call America's birthplace the City of Brotherly Love. But in the deep south of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the people here have no such illusions. Racism runs bloody red through the ground, in the hearts of hateful history, and stands on the tips of tongues of old timers.
Although there are dozens of similar unsolved disappearances and murders of the same ilk, occurring at the same time and in the same part of the country, filmmakers Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano look back to 1964 when an armed mob of cowardly Klansmen murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in the county of Neshoba, Mississippi.
Two Yankee Jews and a local African American, the three "communists" were helping African Americans exercise their right to vote. One night, after being arrested on a bogus traffic ticket, the men were released from jail, only to be pulled over, again, and for the last time. Because they were white, the 20-year-old Goodman and the 24-year-old Schwerner were killed immediately. For the 21-year-old African-American Chaney, the human-race traitors had less benign plans.
In the immediate years that followed, bad old-fashioned southern injustice responded to the murders with little conviction, much less punishment. It looked like three young patriotic American men were going to die at the hands of domestic terrorists and there was not a damn thing the local KKK-infiltrated police, the State of Mississippi or the FBI were going to do about it (there is no myth-ill-logical Mississippi Burning storytelling here).
Yet the years passed, and while grieving family members continued to fight for justice, the extraordinary miscegenated citizens of Neshoba came together and formed the Philadelphia Coalition. These people were not going to let unbridled old violent dogs lay. There were people in the town who were involved and they had to answer for their crimes.
Of course, others wanted to keep history buried with the boys.
Unfortunately, no one was sufficiently held accountable until 2005, when the State of Mississippi indicted Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old racist, anti-Semite, ignoramus who makes up the most asinine things as he goes along (like too many rightwing commentators).
Although they started shooting a documentary about Neshoba in 2004, when Killen (a man who fits his name) was indicted, Dickoff and Pagano persuaded Killen to let them follow him through his trial and, sometimes, fake tribulations. Unsurprisingly, this access does not favor Killen who essentially views the murders as a necessary good for the preservation of an American disease known as racism, but what I would call an American modus vivendi known as rip others -- the more "foreign" the more easier -- down to your level or lower rather than pull yourself and the community up.
A valuable lesson in truth not dying, Neshoba: The Price of Freedom is a timeless reminder there are still many in this country believing some American citizens deserve second-class status and therefore we must look to the cameras and courts for justice.
