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⡘ 194 Exploitation Movies and the Freedom Struggle of the 1960s Sharon Monteith In the 1960s a small but significant number of pulp movies used civil rights in the South as a dramatic trigger, specifically massive resistance to the Freedom Rides in 1961 and to the voter registration drives that culminated in Freedom Summer in 1964. The movies were released in the moment in which the South became synonymous with racist mobs, burnings, and bombings in the popular imagination, and they capitalized on deleterious images of the South. The insertion of northern middleclass “foreigners”—“red diaper babies” and students from Ivy League schools—into the “savage” South was not only a media dream but a source of melodrama for filmmakers. That these films have been ignored has led to a truncated sense of the range of the civil rights movie and of the specific ways in which mass-culture forms adjusted to local circumstances to exploit dramatic, compelling, and even tragic events in the civil rights era. This gap is significant in film history because it is surprising . The movement’s express intention to publicize racial violence was so effective that images of demonstrators facing down segregationists dominated television news in the first half of the 1960s. The Dixiecrats evolved their own dramatic props, including fire-and-brimstone edicts and performances such as “standing in the schoolhouse door,” as well as epic scenes with state troopers and the National Guard. But the movement ’s expert dramatization of nonviolence—in the form of Freedom Rides, sit-ins, boycotts, marches, and demonstrations—ensured that individual stories of the freedom struggle coalesced in the kind of saga that, to borrow an aphorism, Hollywood could not have made up. In 1962 John Steinbeck described the “strange drama” of massive resistance to civil rights initiatives as having “the same draw as a fivelegged calf or a two-headed foetus at a sideshow, a distortion of normal life we have always found so interesting that we will pay to see it.”1 Exploitation Movies & Freedom Struggle 195 However, the story of the risks civil rights volunteers took when faced with some of the most explosive and notorious episodes in U.S. history has rarely been told in cinema. Typically, civil rights workers have been caught in an epistemological drift, their stories of facing down violence overlooked as in Mississippi Burning (1988), dispersed through narrative subplots as in Everybody’s All-American (1988), and located in tv movies —the dominant form through which stories of the civil rights movement have been brought to the masses—rather than big budget features. Their story began to be dramatized seriously only at the very end of the twentieth century in Freedom Song (1999), itself a Turner Network Television (tnt) production whose focus is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc) and its battle to register African American voters in McComb, Mississippi. It is ironic that such a vocal group as student organizers should be elided, especially when baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s have safeguarded images of the decade across the culture industries and reinvested in the moral high ground that the movement made manifest.2 Since the 1980s there has, of course, been developing a series of films in which movement successes are celebrated, from Crisis at Central High (1981) to Boycott! (2001), honored with an naacp Image Award, to The Rosa Parks Story (2002). Rather than a self-evident body of knowledge to which feature films allude, civil rights history is an arena of ideological divisions; it may serve dramatic as well as ideological ends to mythologize Rosa Parks as a tired seamstress rather than a trained activist but even the most emotionally charged movies made in recent decades overlook the civil rights delirium epitomized by the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer and what Cornel West summarized as the “boiling sense of rage and a passionate pessimism regarding America’s will to justice” that characterized the era.3 The reasons for this oversight are various. Nostalgic ensemble productions such as Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) or The Big Chill (1983) tend to privilege the New Left and the antiwar movement in memory texts about a lost radicalism. The racial struggle has also been presented as the particularized cinematic province of African American directors, following controversies over British director Alan Parker’s portrayal of the 1964 murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi Burning and as underlined by Spike Lee’s reported comments...

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