About four years ago, a colleague invited Myra Ottewell, a native Jacksonian and teacher in British Columbia, to speak to his class after they viewed "Mississippi Burning," the 1988 movie about the murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in Philadelphia, Miss. in 1964. Expecting a discussion about her home state, Ottewell was met with skepticism. She was defensive, they said, and they dismissed her as "an ignorant white woman who couldn't see beyond her picket fence."
From the experience, Ottewell was compelled to examine the beliefs she grew up with, about the relationships between blacks and whites, and about how far the Magnolia State had come since the Civil Rights Era. "Mississippi ReMixed" is the result.
At its best, the documentary is a story of one woman's struggle to come to terms with a brutal history she was blissfully unaware of for decades. Although she grew up in the midst of the Civil Rights Eragraduating from Provine High School in 1964 and attending Mississippi State College for Womenthe people of Ottewell's idyllic white upbringing clearly sheltered her from seeing the reality of the economic and social norm of the day: white supremacy. And not seeing it, she had no impetus to examine it. The experience of seeing through the slats of her black maid's shotgun-house walls to the yard seems to have been curiously unaffecting. She knew she wasn't supposed to drink from the colored water fountain at the zoo, but couldn't say why.
"Everybody knew their place," she says in "Mississippi ReMixed." And that place, for a middle-class white kid growing up in Jackson after World War IIwhether she knew it or notwas one of power and privilege. That understanding was a revelation to Ottewell.
"How could I have been so sheltered and so naive to have been raised here and not have felt more about it or known more about it?" asks her childhood friend Caroline, a Jackson State professor, about the vicious realities of racism. It's a question central to Ottewell's journey. Whites could "love" their black domestics, could even play with black children, as long as those blacks also knew their place. It was a simple, brutal code of behavior entrenched in Mississippi society for hundreds of years, one with echoes that persist in the present.
Ottewell interviews numerous personalities working for racial justice in modern-day Mississippi. From Carlton Turner of Turner World Around Productions, she learns that the economic plight of many of today's black Mississippians is not because of some mythical "racial work habits," but because of institutionalized racism dating back centuries.
Ottewell discovers that her great-great grandfather got his 240 acres free through the federal swamp land grant of 1850. Owning land was a whites-only cornerstone that allowed her family to survive the Great Depression. Federal and state laws well into the mid-20th century kept blacks in their place: subservient, tied to cotton plantations and isolated from any opportunity for social or economic advancement.
From Susan Glisson of the William Winter Institute, she learns about the activities of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. From Gov. Winter, that racism was thoroughly entrenched in Mississippi. She learns of her father's complicity in keeping blacks out of her white neighborhood. She talks with Brad "Kamikaze" Franklin about black apathy, Dolphus Weary about black inferiority, with JFP editor-in-chief Donna Ladd about dealing with instead of burying the past.
Despite Ottewell's courage, the documentary has a few disturbing moments. Viewing the house in Jackson where she grew up, she fails to address the boarded-up house behind her. Saying that she loved and respected blacks growing up, she also admits to her then-contempt of black civil-rights workers for upsetting the unjust "peace." She learns of footage shot by local TV during the Civil Rights Era that was never aired, yet doesn't delve into the complicity of mainstream media in keeping the populace of the state ignorant. She shows politicians at a '60s Neshoba County Fair, yet makes no attempt to connect the rhetoric of the past"dictatorial left-wing social planners"with the rhetoric of 2010.
"Mississippi ReMixed" is best seen as a personal journey toward banishing one woman's ignorance. It isn't meant to be a comprehensive historical perspective, and it's not.
Ottewell tries a little too hard to find instances of how much Mississippi has changed. She goes to McComb to attend a graduation of 10 students expelled in the '60s for supporting a student who joined the civil rights struggle. She has to follow the white and black middle-class flight from Jackson to Madison Central High School in order to show a successfully integrated school where black and white children can be best friendsan unsatisfying end to an unfinished journey.
Finally, through juxtaposing a Martin Luther King speech with glowing positive images of success, Ottewell fails to point to the rest of the path, or even to acknowledge that Mississippiand possibly Ottewell herselfstill has a long way to go.
"Mississippi ReMixed" airs Thursday, Feb. 11 at 8 p.m. on Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
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