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From The Late 1990s:
Reliving “Ghosts of Mississippi” |
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“Ghosts” Still Alive In Mississippi
Attorney brings different perspective to film after sojourn in the South
Herald & Review Staff Writer
EFFINGHAM – When Scott Ealy eased into his theater seat in Mattoon last week to watch “Ghosts of Mississippi,” he wasn't watching as the average moviegoer. The 36-year-old Effingham attorney lived in the factual film's locale of Jackson, Miss., from 1990 to 1993, while attending Mississippi College School of Law.
The film, released last month, tells of the 1963 murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers and – more than 30 years later – the conviction of his assassin, white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith. Thanks to prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter and Evers' widow, Myrlie, de la Beckwith was brought to trial again in 1994, after hung juries in 1964 and 1965.
Ealy put himself through law school by, among other things, working at a local Top 40 radio station. In 1992, he covered Mississippi Supreme Court oral arguments on the legality of an eventual third de la Beckwith trial, and fed reports to CBS News.
“The station that I worked for was very understaffed,” Ealy explained in an interview last week. “Of the possible reporters at the station, no one else was interested in working the trial.'”
Yet Ealy acknowledged his own conflict in covering the issue.
He was the sole white member of the Jackson branch of the NAACP and had publicly complained after former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke said de la Beckwith couldn't receive a fair trial in Mississippi.
When Ealy, an Effingham native, moved to Mississippi in 1990 to attend law school, he found a different world. He was branded a “Yankee'' and shown apartments that landlords (made a point of stressing) would not be rented to blacks.
“When I moved down there, I expected things to really have changed a lot,” Ealy said. “I expected it to be 1990, and really it wasn't.”
Becoming active in the NAACP and working on its publicity committee, he got to know many of the black leaders in the community, including Evers' brother, Charles.
Charles Evers hosts a weekly radio talk show in Jackson, and Ealy was a guest on occasion.
“He didn't like to talk about the fact of (his younger brother's murder),” Ealy recalled. “It wasn't the overwhelming theme of his programs, and he always referred to a possible retrial of de le Beckwith as ‘Myrlie's thing.'”
[Evers would say later that he often became angry and heartbroken merely contemplating the possibility that a third de la Beckwith trial could end without a conviction].
Ealy also spoke personally with Myrlie Evers after the Supreme Court arguments in the de la Beckwith case.
“I stepped out of my role as a reporter when I met her,” Ealy recalled. “I told her that I wished her efforts well. I think it was very clear whose ‘side’ I was on.”
Ealy said he once was ridiculed by some white law school students for wearing a shirt emblazoned with a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. (on the Dr. King holiday), but also was received with initial suspicion by some members of the NAACP.
“I think that they were cautious and maybe somewhat skeptical as to what motivated my strong interest in these issues,” Ealy said.
“Ghosts of Mississippi,'' directed by Rob Reiner, stars Alec Baldwin as Bobby DeLaughter, James Woods as Byron de la Beckwith and Whoopi Goldberg as Myrlie Evers.
Ealy had high praise for the movie and noted that several of the principals in the case appeared as themselves. His only regret was that more of Evers' life wasn't explored, rather than his murder.
The movie received disappointing box office nationwide and already has left theaters in Decatur and Mattoon. It remains available in some St. Louis movie houses.
“I don't see what more could possibly have been done,” Ealy said. “I think the movie is an excellent way of getting more publicity for this important case.”
“For so long, Medgar Evers and his family went without the proper amount of recognition. Hopefully, this case was the first step in a long overdue process.''
Copyright, 1997, Herald & Review, Decatur, IL |
