James Chaney - Representation in Other Media

Representation in Other Media

• The 1975 2-part TV movie, Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan was based on Don Whitehead's book (Attack on Terror: The F.B.I. Against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi), detailing the events a week before the assassinations and concluding with the Federal trial of the conspirators. Actor Hilly Hicks portrayed "Charles Gilmore," a fictionalized representation of James Chaney.
• Meridian 1976, a novel by Alice Walker, portrayed issues of the civil rights era.
• The 1988 film, Mississippi Burning, was loosely based upon these events.
• The circumstances surrounding the deaths of the activists were the subject of the 1990 TV movie Murder in Mississippi, which featured Blair Underwood as James Chaney.
• In the Season 13 episode, "Chosen," of the series Law & Order, a defense lawyer Randy Dworkin (played by Peter Jacobson) prefaces a speech against affirmative action with the phrase, "Janeane Garofalo herself can storm into my office and tear down the framed photos of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, that I keep on the wall over my desk..."
• The band Flobots' song, "Same Thing," asks to bring back Chaney.
• In Stephen King's The Dark Tower fantasy novel Song of Susannah (2005), the protagonist Odetta Holmes met Chaney and his colleagues in Oxford Town.