MOVIES - Jan. 19, 1989

Meanwhile, a brother of one of three civil rights activists killed in Mississippi in 1964 is unhappy with the re-enactment of the slayings in Parker’s “Mississippi Burning.” Stephen Schwerner, whose brother Michael was one of the victims, says, “The movie is terribly dishonest and very racist. It terribly distorts the realities of 1964.” Parker has repeatedly emphasized that “Mississippi Burning” is fiction. Schwerner, 51, dean of students at Antioch College, said the movie portrays blacks as passive spectators in the civil rights movement in the South and the FBI as a champion of civil rights. “In general, the FBI was an enemy of the civil rights movement,” he said. “They had to be dragged into the case kicking and screaming by Lyndon Johnson, and only then because two of the victims were white.”