Mississippi's Social Transformation in Public Memories of the Trial Against Byron de la Beckwith for the Murder of Medgar Evers

Abstract

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted for the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Journalistic coverage of the trial and the 1996 docudrama Ghosts of Mississippi crafted a social values transformation myth that depicted Beckwith as the primary villain of the civil rights past and cast his conviction as a sign that racism had been cleansed from Mississippi. Popular media naturalized this myth intertextually though narrative repetition and through symbolic cues that established the film as a source of historic understanding. These cues deflected critical attention from contemporary social conditions that have maintained racial inequity and continue to prompt racially motivated hate crimes.

Feminine Purity and Masculine Revenge-Seeking InTaken(2008)

“…In other words, hegemony is attained through the diffusion of the preferred ideas and interests of the powerful into the fabric of mainstream society (Artz and Murphy 2000). Though they are fictive texts, films play an important role in cultivating hegemonic ideals on issues of race and gender by equipping popular audiences with dominant cultural logics, inviting them to identify with and inhabit idealized subject positions, and attesting to the common-sense of the images and narrative produced on screen (Hoerl 2008;Nichols 1981). Vera and Gordon (2003, 15) use the term "sincere fictions" to elaborate how hegemonic whiteness and masculinity operate not as the overt message of Hollywood films, but as taken-for-granted assumptions that take on the appearance of being innate, unchanging, and necessary structures of social existence.…”

A call to use psychology for anti-racist jury selection.

“…On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, a 37 year-old Black man, was shot to death in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi (Hoerl, 2008; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1963).…”

Burning Mississippi into Memory? Cinematic Amnesia as a Resource for Remembering Civil Rights

“…Mississippi Burning is one of several civil rights films that have deflected critical attention from more contemporary instances of racism (Hoerl, 2008;Madison, 1999). By foregrounding the FBI's struggle to bring civil rights violators to justice, the film offers symbolic resolution to the cultural contradictions exposed when expressed social and political commitments to racial equality are contradicted by ongoing instances of racial injustice and racially motivated violence.…”