Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 12

_Po£uIar_CuUur^

n.
In early winter of 1967, nineteen years before the space shuttle
Challenger accident of January 28, 1986, three astronauts burned to
death in their Apollo 1 space vehicle while it rested on launch pad
#34 at Cape Kennedy, now Cape Canaveral. Like the Challenger
victims, the men who died in 1967—their names were Edward White
II, Virgil Grissom, and Roger Chaffee—were felt by many to possess
heroic arete in the ancient Greek sense, and it's safe to say that few
members of the American public would deny them admittance to the
pantheon of contemporary tragic heroes. Once again, however, we
should ask what we really mean by these terms.
In the "Freedom Sununer" of 1964, three young members of
SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, two
whites and one black, drove down to Mississippi to help register
black voters for the upcoming fall elections. These men—their names
were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—
were murdered in the night by white separatists intent on denying
blacks their right to vote. These killings were briefly noted in the
national press, which then turned its attention to the upcoming
presidential campaigns of Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater.
"We do not know how brave they actually were," Douglas J.
Stewart writes of the three SNCC volunteers. "We do know," he
continues,
that they were not lionized in life, and that they
have been mostly forgotten in death. They were not
especially beautiful, not particularly endowed with
the frame or the dazzle of an Achilles or an
astronaut.
Three decades later, Hollywood finally cashed in on these and other
murders committed during the American Civil Rights Movement.
Mississippi Burning, a film starring Gene Hackman, dramatized the
deaths of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner; Ghosts of Mississippi
reprised the 1963 assassination of NAACP field representative
Medgar Evers. These trendy, profit-making ventures are products of
the incestuous subcultures of media marketing, political correctness,
and pomo-violence of present-day America; one could hardly say