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Only after the murders provoked a national outcry did the FBI enter Mississippi in force and begin a massive effort to undermine the Klan. Until then Director J. Edgar Hoover's insistence that the bureau was a strictly investigative agency forced FBI agents to invest far more energy in busting stolen car rings and foiling bank robberies than in probing even the most flagrant depredations against blacks. In 1961 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights suggested that since the bureau was often so closely linked to Southern law-enforcement officials, another group might take over the handling of civil rights cases. Justice Department prosecutors became so dissatisfied with the bureau's lethargic performance in voting-rights cases that they concocted "coaching" memos that spelled out exactly which questions should be asked of exactly which witness in civil rights investigations. Only by boxing in the agents in that way could the lawyers be sure the FBI would gather the evidence needed to file discrimination suits.
The truth is that Hoover loathed blacks and detested their leaders, and so did many of his men. According to an agent quoted by Hoover's biographer Richard Gid Powers, during the early '60s "in about 90% of the situations in which bureau personnel referred to Negroes, the word 'nigger' was used." Until 1962 there were only five black FBI agents: Hoover's chauffeurs, houseboy and messenger. During the period dealt with in Burning, Hoover's bureau was indeed engaged in a lawless campaign against an enemy. But its target was Martin Luther King Jr. It began with wiretaps and buggings, approved by then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, aimed at digging up proof that King was under the influence of suspected Communists. The surveillance yielded plenty about King's extramarital affairs, which Hoover circulated among high government officials and journalists. In his important study of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch writes that by 1963 Hoover was so convinced King was a danger to America that the bureau no longer alerted him to death threats. In late 1964 FBI agents mailed a threatening letter and tape recording of King's sexual escapades to his wife, apparently in hopes that the revelation would drive him to suicide.
None of these facts are in dispute or particularly difficult to come by, but the makers of Mississippi Burning, in their pursuit of a box-office smash, chose to ignore them. In the process, they have not only turned history inside out but have also lent support to a racist myth. Says Seth Cagin, co-author of We Are Not Afraid, a rigorous account of the Philadelphia murders: "The film suits the fantasy of the Ku Klux Klan that the FBI was an invading tyrannical force that imposed its will on the South because it played dirty." It is bad enough that most Americans know next to nothing about the true story of the civil rights movement. It would be even worse for them to embrace the fabrications in Mississippi Burning.