MovieChat Forums > Free State of Jones (2016) Discussion > Why I don't want to see this movie

Why I don't want to see this movie


I'm a Civil War history fan but I do not want to see this movie.

That should not stop anyone else who wants to see the movie.

I don't want to watch the movie because we all know that it did nothing to change the course of post-Civil War history. After federal occupation of the South ended in 1877, the former Confederate states moved quickly to regain power within their respective states. First on their agenda was to keep the black man in his place. A dark curtain of American apartheid descended upon the South for the next one hundred years.

American apartheid and the Jim Crow laws (an example of when the U.S. Supreme Court failed the United States) was a plague upon the Southern states. It kept the black man as peasants and serfs in the South. For over one-hundred years the white southerners were content to live in their quasi-medieval world, not realizing that apartheid and Jim Crow kept the South from advancing much further than it could have. But the white Southerners could not and would not acknowledge a possible future of the South that was far better than what they could see in front of them.

Only at the end of the 20th century did that start to change in any significant way and progress is still on-going.

MISSISSIPPI: In the 150 years following the Civil War, the state of Mississippi cultivated an unsavory reputation as the nexus of all racial bigotry and hatred, with the state of Arkansas close behind. American history books all through the 20th century repeated this history. Mississippi was America's Afghanistan, a land where time stood still and the natives were mired in their medieval, narrow-minded past, ultra-conservatism and dogged, stubborn, even violent resistance to change. No one in America outside these particular Southern states harbored any desire to visit much less tour any part of it, where visitors were sure to receive a cold even hostile reception. The typical American tourist was more likely to visit communist China and receive a warmer welcome rather than tour the dark highways and byways of mysterious Mississippi. These states were places where you hoped your car didn't break down on the major through interstate nor did you want to be stopped and accosted by sinister highway patrol cops wearing Smokey Bear hats and reflector sunglasses, blowing cigar or cigarette smoke in your face with their hands gripping .38 or .357 revolvers and telling you to get out of the car. Eventually change can and does come, even if it does come slowly because thank the Lord that people don't live forever.

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[deleted]

Don't blame me. I'm just the messenger here. I didn't invent the history of Mississippi and Arkansas. The people of Mississippi and Arkansas and other Deep South states created their own history by themselves. I wasn't the one throwing hanging ropes over tree limbs while chewing on Redman chewing tobacco.

And the ghetto town of Detroit and its ilk. Yep, the liberal northerners created their own problems as well and Detroit is a perfect horrible example of it. But to this day no one has the political will to fix Detroit. Anyone who talks about reform is denounced as a racist.

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Nice revisionism there, Bud. But African slavery in the US started in Virginia (for tobacco farming) when the Native Americans proved to be intractable. The textile industry in the US did not evolve out of the 'cottage' stage until the end of the 18th Century. The 'cottage' mode of production required a number of workers but not enough to require the importation and continued enslavement of Africans; the free populace of the northeast was sufficient to support the production of textiles. The 2 Northern States that allowed slavery post-independence, New York and New Jersey, outlawed slavery in 1799 and 1804 respectively. And in those 2 States, slavery was never on an "industrial" scale as it was in South Carolina or Mississippi. The expansion of slavery in the early 19th Century was the direct result of the burgeoning use of machines in the textile industry up North.

~~Bayowolf
There's a difference between being frank... and being dick.

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All but 2 of the 7 Northern States plus Vermont abolished slavery during or just after the Revolution--the other two (as I said) abolished slavery in 1799 and 1804. There was plenty of free people to do the work so, as you said, slavery was deemed "unprofitable". And, also, a lot of Northern financiers made a lot of money financing the slave trade.

A lot of people use that quote from Lincoln to show that he was some kind of hypocrite but the sad fact (for you) is that he did oppose slavery and the South knew it. Why else did 7 States secede after his election but before his inauguration (with the other 4 seceding shortly after his inauguration)?

Everybody is entitled to his own opinion but nobody is entitled to his own facts.


~~Bayowolf
There's a difference between being frank... and being dick.

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Yes, and 95% of people in the South were opposed to slavery. Only rich land owners and politicians wanted to keep slavery going, while the overwhelming majority of dirt poor farmers and average citizens were fighting for their homeland.

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[deleted]

That fact doesn't fit into their agenda. To them every last Southerner was an evil white racist slave owner.

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@jeffyoung


And the ghetto town of Detroit and its ilk. Yep, the liberal northerners created their own problems as well and Detroit is a perfect horrible example of it. But to this day no one has the political will to fix Detroit. Anyone who talks about reform is denounced as a racist.



Being a Detroiter, I can tell you that even though the city still has its problems with crime (which actually lowered last year) like most areas, the downtown area has grown back and had major development and growth over the last decade,a lot of young suburbanites have been moving to the city in the newly revamped and redeveloped midtown area near Wayne State. My point is, I've been in the D nearly 2 decades and seen major changes happen since then,some for the better. The city bounced back from the bankrupcty brought on by the 2008 economic collapse survived an emergency manager we didn't want nor vote for, and is doing way better than it had been doing.

You would know that if you actually bothered to ask anyone on here how things in Detroit actually are. There's been all kinds of reform going on here, but you and anyone who have never even been here make it sound like life in Detroit stopped after the riots---which it didn't. Do some research,and stop trotting out these tired,worn-out,overused,outdated stereotypes about Detroit---and the whole entire city is not a damn "ghetto". Yeah, parts of the city are, but practically every city in existence has one---nothing new there. And the city didn't go down because of "liberals"---that happened because white people never wanted to share any kind of political power with black folks in the city and took off after the riots,depleting the city's tax base. The city's problems are WAY more complicated than the simplistic BS you're putting out there. Read ORIGINS OF THE URBAN CRISIS (written by a former Detroiter,incidently) to find out more about that. The city's long complicated racial history has a lot to do with why the city became the way it became.

And enough of the liberal-bashing bull****----Michigan has been under Republican rule,and a Republican govenor for the last six years. Keep in mind, the Flint water poisoning crisis has happened under his watch,and he also shoved an emergency manager on Detroit and various other cities, despite the fact that people throughout the state of Michigan voted overwhemingly against having one at all. Plus he lawyered up big-time during the federal investigation into what caused the water poisoning, and basically, we the people will wind up paying some of his lawyer's fees. He still hasn't admitted when he found out about the water supply being ruined before he finally declared it an emergency in Sep 2015 (the water has been poisoned since April 2014,btw.) So don't give me this BS nonsense about how only liberals supposedly ruin cities, especially after what's happened in Flint (where people still can't drink the damn water,yet their water bills have still gone up.)


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This movie is about how emancipation and the end of the Civil War basically changed nothing for African Americans.They remained exploited and reviled, prevented from gaining any autonomy by the terrorists of the Klan..

So it is exactly the historical truth you describe.

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I believe the American civil war occurred because the southern states were fed up of the North's taxes and eagerness to control them.

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It was exactly to regain the Souths tax revenue. But it wasn't a Civil War that's just Northern revisionist history being taught. A Civil War is two opposing sides fighting over the same capital. The South weren't trying to overtake Washington.

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You can believe that, but it's false.

Where are the Asian characters DC CW? #MoreAsians

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I'm going to see the movie today. FWIW I have had African American relatives who lived in Mississippi in the 1970s/80s and really I never heard anything worse than what they experienced living in NYC at the same time. I went on a family trip to New Orleans and we drove through Mississippi. We might have stayed a few nights there--I don't remember as it was in the 1990s. I was surprised how nice the people were (whites and blacks) to us and we didn't feel unwelcome at all. Visiting is different from living there, but there are plenty of unhospitable places and people all over the country and not just in the south. There are some neighborhoods in NYC and in my own seaboard city that I wouldn't be caught dead in.

This doesn't change any of the Jim Crow, slavery or whatever else the south as a whole did (and the bigotry and discrimination that some southerners continue to do). But I had never heard of this Mr. Knight and this rebellion by southerners against the Confederate Army so I want to see it. I could look up a book about it, but I think in 2 hours I would learn more about it from the film. (The time it takes me to research the event, get to the library, etc. would be more than 2 hours).

In my life the most scathing ideas about the south have come from New Englanders (many who are so proud of the Mayflower connections and/or Yankee identities that they can't even fathom going south of New York or Philadelphia) and Midwesterners, who have never visited the region either. There is plenty of racism around the country to go around. I have been to different states in the south, Virginia (which I love), North and South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Miss, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, Kentucky (southish/midwestern) and they all had beautiful country and some lovely cities as well. Not all southerners are stuck in that old mindset. Some are, but I have met nice people and even progressive people from the south. I have also been to Texas but to me that is not the south, that is an annex of Mexico!

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[deleted]

The fact that you still call it the Civil War clearly demonstrates that you haven't bothered to actually educate yourself with the truth. A Civil War is two opposing sides fighting over the same capital. The South had their own they weren't trying to take over Washington lol.

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Fact: Everyone (literally everyone) still calls it the Civil War....

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No they don't. Not the people who educated themselves with the true meaning of the term. Only the uneducated or the ignorant still call it the Civil War.

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[deleted]

Our Country suffers mightily from "historical amnesia," and not just with the events of this movie. I'd bet that not one person in a thousand knows of these transgressions during and after The Civil War. So many things that it seems we have conveniently forgotten or were never told.

I've known a bit about this time period and on into "Reconstruction", I feel Lincoln's assassination kept us in some version of it for around 100 years. So many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds that died or were murdered needlessly. "We" are such hypocrits with events from our past. Conveniently almost driving The Native Americans to extinction, the thousands of Asians murdered during the "Gold Rush", forcing a war with Mexico to "steal" the southwest from them and on and on. God help us in the future and forgive our ancestors from the sins and 'conveniences' of the past.

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"Native Americans....Mexico...and on and on."

Yes, but they are no different. The native tribes did not live in perfect peace and harmony. And how did Mexico come into existence? Stole land from the natives?

Land transfers three ways- by deed, by will and by war. We are the current title holders.

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You're not wrong. Those "apprenticeship" laws they brought in straight after the Civil War were an absolute joke. What the hell was wrong with these backward morons? That's something which I suppose has always fascinated and terrified me about America, they're one of the most progressive societies in history yet they have this massive undercurrent of backward thinking, sinister and hateful bigots.

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