Sid Salter
- Columnist Sid Salter writes that you don’t have to be from Mississippi to respect its complexity. You do have to resist the urge to simplify it.
The brutal, disturbing murder of iconic Hollywood actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner in recent days brought to mind his time making a movie in Mississippi in the 1990s.
Mississippi has never lacked for outsiders who think they understand us. We’ve had plenty of carpetbaggers, crusaders, and cultural tourists who arrive with a script already written and leave with their prejudices intact. That’s why Ghosts of Mississippi still matters nearly three decades later—not because it was perfect, but because its director, the late Rob Reiner, did something rare for a Hollywood liberal telling a Southern story. He listened.
Reiner came to Mississippi in the mid-1990s to tell a story that most Mississippians already knew by heart and some preferred to forget. Medgar Evers was murdered in his Jackson driveway in 1963 by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. Two all-white juries couldn’t bring themselves to convict in the 1960s. Justice came only in 1994, when a multiracial jury finally held Beckwith accountable. The arc of justice was long, the delay shameful, and the outcome overdue.
What Reiner grasped—slowly, sometimes awkwardly—was that this wasn’t simply a morality play with clear heroes and villains neatly assigned. Mississippi’s racial history never is. The Evers case involved courage and cowardice, progress and backsliding, redemption and betrayal. It involved the late Bill Waller, who failed twice as a prosecutor and later succeeded politically as a capable governor. It involved Bobby DeLaughter, the young Hinds County prosecutor who finally won a conviction, then years later disgraced himself in a corruption scandal that complicated the very narrative Reiner had helped elevate.
Reiner could have told a cleaner story. Instead, Ghosts of Mississippi lingered in the gray areas. James Woods’ chilling portrayal of Beckwith wasn’t cartoonish; it was unsettling because it felt ordinary and ominously familiar. Alec Baldwin’s DeLaughter was earnest but uncertain, driven as much by personal history as public duty. The film’s restraint frustrated some activists who wanted a sharper indictment. But it also rang true to anyone who has watched Mississippi inch forward without fully outrunning its past.
My friend Willie Morris understood this tension better than most. In his book The Ghosts of Medgar Evers, Morris approached Reiner with a mixture of gratitude and skepticism. He appreciated that a Hollywood filmmaker had taken Mississippi’s story serious enough to wrestle with it rather than exploit it. But Morris also warned readers not to confuse cinematic justice with reality. The danger, he wrote, was that audiences would mistake a courtroom verdict for closure.
Morris didn’t let Reiner off the hook, but he didn’t dismiss him either. He recognized that Reiner was changed by Mississippi. The experience sharpened Reiner’s political worldview—not by confirming his assumptions about Southern backwardness, but by confronting him with the persistence of moral courage in unlikely places. Myrlie Evers-Williams, who waited three decades for justice, was not a symbol to Reiner; she was a person whose patience and dignity forced him to reconsider easy narratives about race and redemption.
That may be the film’s most lasting contribution to Reiner’s legacy. Known for comedies and courtroom dramas, Reiner had always worn his politics on his sleeve. But Ghosts of Mississippi marked a shift from preaching to persuading. It acknowledged that progress is made not by righteous speeches alone, but by uncomfortable listening—by understanding how history sits in a place like Mississippi, heavy and unavoidable.
Mississippians sometimes bristle at outsiders telling our stories, and often for good reason. Too many have done it poorly. But Reiner’s time here offers a lesson worth remembering. You don’t have to be from Mississippi to respect its complexity. You do have to resist the urge to simplify it.
The irony, of course, is that the film’s moral clarity was later muddied by real life. DeLaughter’s fall from grace didn’t invalidate the Beckwith conviction, but it reminded us that no one is immune to temptation, and no victory is permanent. That, too, is a Mississippi lesson—one Reiner didn’t shy away from, even as it complicated the legacy of his film.
In the end, Ghosts of Mississippi didn’t tell us who to be. It asked us to remember who we’ve been. For a Hollywood outsider, that was no small achievement. And for Mississippi, it was a rare moment when someone came here not to lecture, but to learn.
