Memory of Prison Cell Shapes Filner’s View of Rights Film

In the spring of 1961, civil rights leaders put out a call to fill the jails of Mississippi, and a shy, slender math major from New York named Bob Filner decided to join a Freedom Ride beginning on the campus of Cornell University.

“Hundreds of kids showed up and signed up to go,” said Filner, who recalled those events after viewing a screening of the current movie “Mississippi Burning.” The film focuses on the Klan-ordered executions of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, three years after Filner answered the call and ended up in a Mississippi prison.

“We got to three days before we were going, and there were five of us. And (with) a couple of days left, there were three of us. One kid, his father bought him a car if he wouldn’t go.

“Finally (there were) two of us left. . . . And when we finally got arrested, and the names got back to Cornell, they said ‘Who’s Bob Filner?’ ”

Jailed as Freedom Rider

These days, Bob Filner is a San Diego City Councilman but, for two months in the summer of 1961, Bob Filner was a frightened 18-year-old in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, a freedom rider trying to help change the state’s 100-year-old system of racial segregation and get home with his skull intact.

In the current examination of Hollywood’s tendency to glorify the white contribution to the civil rights movement--”Mississippi Burning” and the television movie “Unconquered” have caused the most furor--Filner’s perspective is a rare one. He is white and he was there.

Arrested in a Jackson, Miss., bus station for “breach of peace” and “inciting a riot” for sitting down in a restaurant with an integrated group, Filner spent about two months in Parchman, much of it with civil rights leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, who would soon bring the movement to national prominence.

By the summer of 1961, Southern law enforcement officers and freedom riders were adhering to a prearranged script. Most states would not allow freedom riders off the buses, choosing to avoid the publicity that came from arresting and jailing them.

But Mississippi, the South’s staunchest segregationist state, was still jailing the activists.

“By that time, it had gotten pretty stylized,” Filner said. “You’d get off in Jackson, and you’d get arrested. You’d serve as much time as you could in jail. That’s as much as we knew.

“We knew people were being beaten up. People were being killed. I don’t think we thought that would happen to us, but it was a possibility.”

After a few days of training in Tennessee and a daylong bus ride, Filner’s small contingent disembarked in Jackson to a true “Mississippi Burning” mob scene of howling whites demanding that they go home.

Maximum Security

“If we hadn’t been arrested, we would have been in real trouble,” he said. “We would have been lynched.”

After a few days in local jails--Filner doesn’t remember an arraignment or a trial--they were shipped to Parchman and locked in tiny maximum-security cells.

Guarded by other maximum-security prisoners, “it was a very scary time. . . . Kids were beaten up. Kids were dragged around, and you were completely isolated from where we had started. Anything could happen to us.

“My mother kept writing to the warden: ‘I hope you’re taking care of my son,’ ” Filner laughed. “He wrote back: ‘Your son Robert is doing fine. He has had medical attention.’ We (still) have this letter from the warden.”

Son Robert wasn’t doing all that well, but he was surviving. Isolated from the rest of the prison population, the freedom riders were not allowed books, letters, newspapers or any other distractions. Once a week they were allowed out of their cells to shower and receive fresh clothing. At one point, they went on a hunger strike, and prison officials took their clothes and turned on the heat during the stifling Mississippi days.

“I was (in a cell) a couple of weeks with one guy. He just went crazy,” Filner said. “You just had nothing to do all day. People got very frustrated. I may have driven the guy crazy myself, because there was enough room to do, sort of, sit-ups and push-ups and jumping jacks. Just do it by the bed. I’d be doing these jumping jacks or sit-ups and I must have driven him crazy. I mean, I was trying to stay sane.”

The prisoners set up a disciplined communication system, holding meetings without seeing each other. They supported each other in the face of pressure from prison officials, sang, and reminded each other why they were there.

“What was dangerous about us, and they recognized that, was our ideas. They didn’t want us to talk to anybody, any other prisoners, black or white,” Filner said.

One of the youngest prisoners, Filner was called down to the warden’s office for offers to go home. “You know what Martin Luther King is doing back in New York?” the warden would ask. “He’s driving around in a big car and eating good meals. And you’re here. Don’t you want to go home?”

“Those of us who had gone through that, we won,” Filner said. “That is, as a result of our efforts, we changed the laws of Mississippi. We changed American history, I think. All of us, working together, not as individuals.”

Filner acknowledges that “Mississippi Burning’s” major flaws, the target of so much criticism, are undeniable. The film’s heroes are two white FBI agents who solve the murders of three freedom riders, two white and one black, by resorting to the same kind of violent intimidation that the Ku Klux Klan used to terrorize blacks into silence.

Blacks, when they are on screen at all, are depicted as passive, long-suffering victims and by-standers.

The film has that backward, Filner said.

“The thing that bothers me most about the movie was that there was no black leadership,” he said. “And that’s who did it. We were supporting characters. We gave it some protection, and we brought in the FBI . . . but they changed it.”

“The ending moral of this movie is you have to become evil to beat the evil,” he added. “The whole (philosophy) of King and SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) in those early years . . . the whole point of the civil rights movement up through this time was that morality would conquer immorality. And we were trained in non-violence, not just as a tactic but as a philosophy.”

FBI Was the Enemy

In 1961, the FBI was as much the enemy as the local sheriffs who put Filner and his companions in a Jackson jail cell. Civil rights leaders didn’t count on J. Edgar Hoover’s troops for anything, and, as Filner noted, the all-white FBI was “dragged kicking and screaming” into the case only because two white kids were missing.

The movie also stereotypes whites, Filner said, painting all Southerners as white trash or Klansmen, ignoring the courtliness of middle- and upper-class Southern society, and the segment of the white population that wanted integration.

Despite its faults, Filner said he liked the movie and is pleased that it was made. The palpable fear that pervaded the South during his Mississippi summer (and on a subsequent summer Filner spent in Alabama in 1964), is vividly portrayed on screen. The movie’s opening shot, of separate water fountains for whites and blacks, is a compelling reminder of a situation that is unthinkable today.

“If you went to the South today, you wouldn’t encounter literally any of that,” he said. “Certainly, the whole legal structure has changed. The economic structure has changed. . . .