You might not know it if you're only paying attention to mainstream media this week, but 2014 is not merely the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' ballyhooed arrival in America. The beloved Fab Four may have met boxer Cassius Clay (soon to become Muhammad Ali) for publicity purposes in Miami in February 1964, but there was a whole lot more going on in the segregated South at the time.
This year also marks the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, when hundreds of brave college students (mostly white Northerners) - as well as a cadre of legal & medical support staff - traveled to bloody Mississippi to register black voters, thereby hastening the demise of Jim Crow. As part of its Independent Lens series, PBS is broadcasting Dawn Porter's documentary "Spies of Mississippi" on Monday, February 10. Check your local listings & set your DVRs.
Based on journalist Rick Bowers's book "Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement" (2010), the new film details efforts by that benighted state's so-called Sovereignty Commission (& its local White Citizens Councils) to suppress democracy. They tried terrorizing anyone who dared to challenge the disenfranchisement of African-Americans - or any other manifestation of Mississippi's strict racist system of segregation & subordination.
State-sponsored counter-measures included infiltrating the NAACP, SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had spearheaded the Freedom Summer project) & other civil-rights groups with both "Negro" & white informants. Peaceful activists were being murdered with impunity in Mississippi while LBJ & RFK dragged their feet. Public pressure finally forced the president & attorney general to send a team of FBI investigators to the Ku Klux Klan-infested Magnolia State.
Watch & learn why jazz singer/pianist Nina Simone wrote & recorded the angry "Mississippi Goddamn" in 1964, when American apartheid was finally on the wane. For a literary take on the civil rights revolution, read Alice Walker's novel Meridian (1976), partially based on her experiences as a black activist-writer married to a Jewish lawyer in Jackson (MS) in the 1960s. Walker makes history seem less a remote mystery & more a vital story of individuals through the power of intense prose.
You see, pop music's British Invasion was paralleled in 1964 by a Southern invasion of civil-rights workers armed only with righteous courage. Yeah, yeah, yeah!
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