IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

In the heat of the night, we see the observation of how freedom of Black Americans is perceived and treated.

There's a moment approximately a third of the way into The Heat of the Night that tells you everything you should know about the movie, and everything to know about this time period. A black man is arrested for murder. Not because his DNA matched the content found at the crime scene, if they were to examine that at all. But simply due to the fact he was sitting at a train station, at night, in Mississippi, with money located in his pocket. Has legally or visibly done anything wrong? No. He simply was in the written location at the wrong time leading to his unprovoked arrest. 

The man turns out to be Virgil Tibbs, who is a homicide detective originally from Philadelphia, played by Sidney Poitier with a stillness that still reads as both dignity and armor.

The local police chief, Bill Gillespe- who was played by Rod Steiger, won himself the best actor oscar award- is mortified upon discovery that his own department had just arrested a sworn police officer. He reluctantly permits Tibbs to stay to help solve the already confusing case.

What is to follow is far from being a murder mystery. It becomes ninety minutes of two men who cannot merely stand the sight of one another slowly becoming colleagues.

Freedom is not just a legal stat on paper, but the permission of society and peers

On the legal papers to the state, Tibbs is documented as a freeman, he is a sworn in police officer legally recognized, and upholds his job with dignity and pride. Howbeit, the moment he steps off the train, he is immediately treated as a danger, whether his authority given by law has been validated. This movies most valuable pieces is ever so simple; Black Americans have upheld 60 years of freedom on paper, but Tibbs spent the entirety of the film almost proving his right to be somewhere and proving himself to his white colleagues who still chose to see him as an inferior simply due to his appearance not being completely matched with eurocentric standards. 

This is proven through countless small moments hidden throughout the entire film, but none hit harder than what's now considered one of cinema’s most electric scenes. When plantation owner Endicott strikes unassuming tibbs across the face for the audacity of questioning him and his authority. Tibbs reluctantly strikes him back and it is one of television's most shocking moments in history. It is a moment in film when a man refuses to shrink back into the role everyone else expects him to play. Endicott’s face immediately after is not angry though, it is pure confusion and wonder. As in his world, nothing of this nature ever should happen. Gillespie watches the entire mild altercation but says nothing. He doesn't choose to intervene or apologize. He in fact does not even really react beyond just a glance since he also just witnessed something he does not yet have the language for.

A NATION REDEFINING ITSELF

defining Itself

A Note on Scholarly Collaboration: This work was graced by the distinguished counsel of Claude, an artificial intelligence resource of the highest pedigree, engaged in the pursuit of impeccable historical scholarship. Every inquiry was meticulously curated to demand only sources of unimpeachable academic distinction, in keeping with the exceptional standard of excellence this institution so proudly upholds.

A Nation Redefining Itself

The Civil War ended in April 1865. But a harder question remained unanswered: who counted as a citizen, and what rights came with that status?

The North and the South didn't agree. They never really would.

Just two days after Appomattox, Lincoln floated the idea of voting rights for Black veterans and "very intelligent" Black men. Days later, he was dead, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on Good Friday. Andrew Johnson, a Southern Unionist who despised the planter class but held deeply conservative views on race, took the oath of office and inherited the crisis.https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-Johnson

For freed people, the first order of business wasn't politics. It was family.

Enslaved families had been torn apart for generations, and 1865 brought a wave of newspaper ads and long walks back to the last place a loved one had been seen. It's hard to overstate how much of freedom's early meaning was simply the right to reunite.

Land promised another kind of freedom. General Oliver Howard's Freedmen's Bureau controlled hundreds of thousands of acres of former Confederate land, and briefly offered freed families https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau 40-acre plots with an option to buy. Johnson reversed that policy by September, ordering the land handed back to pardoned Confederates.

What followed was brutal. Black Codes https://www.history.com/articles/black-codes spread across the South, criminalizing unemployment and forcing labor contracts. The Ku Klux Klan formed (KKK)https://www.history.com/articles/ku-klux-klan in 1866, targeting Black landowners and families who dared send their children to school. The Memphis riots https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/lucy-tibbs  that same year left 46 Black residents dead and every Black church and school in the city burned.

Congress pushed back. The 14th Amendment https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment established birthright citizenship, and by 1867, military reconstruction required Southern states to guarantee Black male suffrage. Voting rights among Black men jumped from under 1 percent to over 80 percent almost overnight.

These three years may be among the most hopeful, momentous, and frightening in American history. In less than a decade, people who had been enslaved rose to the highest levels of political life. That's a remarkable story, and one still worth telling.https://www.britannica.com/event/Presidential-Reconstruction

Each One Teach One

Each One Teach One: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner

In the summer of 1964, three young men climbed into a blue Ford station wagon to investigate a burned church in rural Mississippi, and none of them made it home alive. Their names were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and their deaths became one of the defining moments of the American civil rights movement, a moment so significant that the Stanford Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute records that Dr. King himself called their murders "an attack on the human brotherhood taught by all the great religions of mankind."

To understand why these three men were targeted, you have to understand what they were doing in Mississippi in the first place. Freedom Summer, also called the Mississippi Summer Project, was a coordinated effort by the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register Black voters in a state where, according to the Stanford King Institute, intense and violent segregationist resistance had already blocked the direct-action tactics that worked in cities like Birmingham. Michael Schwerner, a twenty-four-year-old CORE organizer from New York, and James Chaney, a young Black Mississippian who had joined the movement locally, had spent months building trust with the Black community in Neshoba County, and according to the SNCC Digital Gateway, they planned to turn Mount Zion Methodist Church into a Freedom School that summer. Andrew Goodman, a twenty-year-old Queens College student, had just arrived as a volunteer to help.

Their organizing made them targets. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's own historical account describes how, on June 16, 1964, a mob of Klansmen looking for Schwerner instead found an empty church, so they burned it down and beat the congregants who were there. When Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner drove to Neshoba County on June 21 to investigate that fire, they never made it back. They were arrested on a pretext of speeding, held in the Philadelphia jail for hours while Klansmen were alerted, and then released after dark straight into an ambush.

What happened next is documented in painstaking detail in the United States Department of Justice's own investigative report, which confirms that Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price coordinated with Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen to intercept the three men on Highway 19 and drive them to a remote road, where they were shot and buried beneath an earthen dam. Their bodies were not found for forty-four days. As the PBS American Experience documentary account notes, it took roughly one hundred fifty FBI agents and hundreds of Navy personnel searching the Mississippi backcountry before the remains were finally uncovered on August 4, 1964.

The killings sparked national outrage precisely because two of the victims were white Northerners, a hard truth that many organizers at the time already understood and resented. Yet the tragedy did what years of organizing alone had struggled to do: it forced the federal government's hand. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act just days after the men vanished, and the murders directly fueled the political momentum behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Justice, however, moved at a crawl. Only seven of the twenty-one men implicated were ever convicted on federal charges, and none served more than six years, according to the Andrew Goodman Foundation, the organization the Goodman family founded to keep his memory alive. It was not until 2005, forty-one years after the murders, that Edgar Ray Killen was finally convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to sixty years in prison.

In 2014, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a recognition that came half a century too late but affirmed what their communities always knew: that three young men who believed a Black Mississippian deserved the same ballot as anyone else paid for that belief with their lives. Each one teach one is not just a slogan. It is exactly what Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were doing when they died, teaching people how to read, how to register, and how to demand freedom that had been withheld from them for generations. Their example asks the rest of us a simple question: what are we willing to teach, and what are we willing to risk, so that someone else can be free?

GONE WITH THE WIND

 Mammy, the character who stays with me close in heart, strikes me by her authority she holds despite her position on the ultimate lowest as it was for a black woman in this time frame. Her resounding confidence, management, and strive for excellence for all is something that is not present in any other characters, let alone one of the white characters. She becomes the backbone of the family holding them up with her sheer will power and determination for success while everyone around her seems to dwindle into the surroundings. At the same time, 

I am holding space for two different things here: Hattie McDaniel's overall acting and performance is beyond just a masterpiece but simply impossible to be recreated or destroyed, it is that iconic of a piece. It is truly masterful and the character has depth you can feel through the screen despite the old age of the film. In addition to this ovation, I hold appreciation for the hybrid persona from Mammy, it is so warm while so authoritative and stern, the persona and leadership that is hard to ever come across. This emotional truth existing beneath this ever so twisted time line and time of incredible strain is admirable.

Gone with the Wind through the spectacle of its female characters reframes the film entirely in the ever most inspiing and emotionally rich way possible. While some movies made in a time of uncertainty are based solely on the search for love and romantic endeavors, this movie becomes a study of different models of womanhood, never seen before in the industry and with the addition of the characters being under the utmost immense pressure. 

Characters such as Mammy with the steady authority, Melanie’s strength that she maintains in the evermost feminine and gentle way possible, Scarlett's ability to adapt even under the most uncertain of scenarios, and even Belle's honorable resilience on the margins of respectable society. The ability and great honor to see women working side by side makes it incredibly clear that this is far more then simply a romance as it’s plot suggests to it’s audience.

Scarlett’s arc is able to raise the question of whether wartime hardship is able to liberate women from the traditional constraints of the original, southern belle role so many women accentuate. I think this film’s response is ambivalent rather than triumphant. Scarlett does become more capable of challenge, and is far more willing to do work, negotiate, and survive by all means possible. However, this film fails to perpetuate this as empowerment but more as desperation and the plot ends up changing her into a far more isolated and aloof person. While she may gain competence she loses a key capability of being able to connect, while Melanie retains throughout. This pattern is not just a factor of the civil war; it shows what so many women were subject to in times of warfare where women would be taking a step into a completely different role than that they were previously used to out of necessity and dire need to make ends meet.

Rhett Butler’s war profiteering is to me the most cynically honest moment of this entire film. The fact he flat out refuses the era’s romantic mythology about noble sacrifice and rather treats the war as simply another market shows his role here, as an opportunist. Although, as a character he also is very valid for his ability to see what is reality and to not sugar coat. 

Finally, I do not think that this film's historical controversy and its moments of honest, genuine emotions can cancel out one another. I believe it is very much possible to capture and show a situation in a romantical way while in reality it is an absolute nightmare while still being able to capture loyalty, grief, and resilience. Though it is much to put into one story, it was needed to make this as successful and as ultimately controversial of a film as it is.

Plessy V. Ferguson`

Mock Trial Argument: In Defense of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Delivered in the voice of counsel for the State of Louisiana

Your Honor, distinguished colleagues — I rise today not to argue that one race is superior to another, but to argue something far narrower, and far more defensible: that the law is not the proper tool for manufacturing social intimacy that does not yet exist on its own.

Consider what this Court is truly being asked to do. My colleague on the other side asks you to believe that a single statute — one line of legislative text — can reach into the customs, habits, and instincts of an entire society and rewrite them by decree. I submit that this overstates what law can do, and what law is for. Legislation does not create affection between peoples. It does not create trust. Those things, if they come at all, come from "natural affinities, mutual appreciation, and voluntary consent" — not from a judge's order or a legislature's command. Louisiana's Separate Car Act does not invent separation. It recognizes a separation that already exists in the daily life of this region, and simply provides for its orderly administration on public conveyances.

And here, Your Honor, is where I ask you to consider not abstract theory, but recent history — living memory for everyone in this courtroom. The years following the war saw this country attempt exactly what my colleague now asks this Court to compel: rapid, legally imposed change to the racial order, undertaken without regard to the customs of the people it governed. And what followed? Riot. Political terror. Mob violence in city after city. I do not raise this to excuse it — I raise it as evidence. Evidence that abrupt compulsion, however well-intentioned, produces friction; and that friction, in close and confined public spaces like a railway car, produces disorder.

This is precisely why states possess what the law calls the police power — the authority to legislate for the public's health, safety, and good order. That is all Louisiana has done here. It has looked at its own recent history, at the real conditions of its own communities, and it has made a judgment — a reasonable judgment — that separate accommodations reduce points of friction rather than create them. This is not a novel use of that power. This Court has already recognized the same reasoning in the context of public schools, where separation by custom and by law was upheld as a legitimate exercise of a state's authority to preserve peace among its people.

Note also what this statute does not do. It does not provide inferior accommodations to one race and superior accommodations to another. It requires equal accommodations — equal in comfort, equal in quality — separated only in location. That is not a badge of inferiority. That is administration. That is order.

I do not ask this Court to declare which social arrangement is ideal for all time. I ask only this: that the Fourteenth Amendment, properly understood, guarantees equality before the law — not an enforced intimacy that custom has not yet produced on its own. Let social change come, if it comes, the way lasting change always has — gradually, voluntarily, from the people themselves — not from a single legislative stroke that this Court has no reliable way to enforce without inviting exactly the disorder it seeks to avoid.

For these reasons, I respectfully urge this Court to affirm the judgment below.

Town Hall Meeting

Frederick Douglass Speaks: A Town Hall Address on Freedom

History mock trial — High Point University

 Frederick Douglass, c. 1879. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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Introduction

For this mock trial assignment, I was tasked with portraying Frederick Douglass — escaped slave, abolitionist, orator, publisher, and statesman — in a town hall address on freedom and discrimination in America. The speech below is a first-person imagining of Douglass addressing this court, built from verified biographical detail drawn from Yale University's scholarship on Douglass and other high-quality academic sources, linked throughout.

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The Address

(Delivered in character, in Douglass's voice)

My name is Frederick Douglass. I was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, in February of 1818, on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland — though even that date is an estimate, because no one thought to record the birth of a slave.

I never knew my father with certainty. I was told he was a white man — perhaps even my own master. I was separated from my mother as an infant, as was the custom, so that no bond of love could grow strong enough to threaten a master's claim on his property.

I tell you this not for your pity. I tell you this so you understand: slavery was not merely labor without wages. It was the deliberate severing of every human tie — mother from child, mind from knowledge, man from his own name.

 Frederick Douglass as a young man, from the 1855 frontispiece of My Bondage and My Freedom. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

When I was eight, I was sent to Baltimore, to the household of Hugh Auld. There, his wife Sophia began teaching me my letters — until her husband forbade it, declaring that if a slave learned to read, he would become "unfit to be a slave."

In that moment, I understood something my masters wished I never would: that reading was the pathway out of bondage — and that they feared it more than they feared my anger.

So I taught myself. I traded bread to hungry children in the street for lessons in spelling. I studied stolen newspapers by candlelight. Knowledge became my first act of rebellion.

I attempted escape once, and failed. In 1838, at twenty years old, I succeeded — arriving in New York City a free man, in the eyes of no law but my own conscience. I took the name Douglass. And I began my life's true work.

I will not stand here and let this court pretend that freedom, once won for me, was won for all.

I spoke before thousands as an abolitionist. I edited my own newspaper, The North Star. I helped found the first Black labor union in this nation. I told audiences again and again that the Fourth of July belonged to them — not to the man still in chains.

I said what needed saying, even when it cost me friendships — including my break from William Lloyd Garrison himself, because I came to believe the Constitution could be turned into an instrument of liberty, not merely an endorsement of slavery.

 Frederick Douglass, 1856 ambrotype held at the National Portrait Gallery. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

I advised President Lincoln. I pressed him to let Black men fight for their own freedom in this war. And when the guns fell silent, and Reconstruction began, I did not retire to comfort. I watched — and I warned — as the promises made to my people were abandoned, one by one, as new laws rose to replace old chains.

So I ask this court:

What is justice, if it is granted — and then withdrawn — the moment it becomes inconvenient?

What is a nation's freedom worth, if it was built — as mine was undone — on the unpaid labor and stolen dignity of millions?

I did not ask for sympathy. I asked — and I still ask — for the plain and simple thing this nation claims to stand for:

That all men are created equal. And that equality is not a gift to be granted — but a right to be honored.

Thank you.

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Sources

This speech was built on biographical fact drawn from the following sources:

• David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom — Yale News, on the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography by Yale's Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave — Yale University Press, MLA-approved scholarly edition
• Frederick Douglass biography — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Frederick Douglass — general biographical and career reference
• The Life of Frederick Douglass — UNCF

Image Credits

All images are public domain works from the Wikimedia Commons Frederick Douglass photograph collection, sourced from institutions including the National Portrait Gallery and the National Archives.

Eight Values of freedom

The Promotion of tolerance under the category of Viewpoint discrimination is an order that can be used very accurately to depict the heavy redaction of major United States cases that are in high public interest. A notable case of this is the infamous case of Jeffery Epstein who prior to his indictment in 2009 then sudden death in 2019 was heavily convicted in engaging in obscene behavior on his private island, Little St James. Above that, the FAA has records of his flight logs of his privately owned Boeing 717, with tail number identification; N908JE had been involved in numerous flight cycles where major politicians and political figures boarded the aircraft and flew towards the US Virgin Islands.

Cases like these that are extremely sensitive and controversial are a very large reason why the United States court system emphasizes so heavily on Viewpoint discrimination and allowing all people no matter their rank in the justice system be able to hold their own opinions and formulate and present ideas within reason. 

Although the crimes Jeffrey Epstein has been convicted of are quite heinous, and definitely not a perfect representation of View Point Discrimination, the press and overall public interest and media recordings about the case can be used appropriately as an excellent example of this law and the constitutional right of speech regardless of the popularity of the issue. To elaborate further on this, in this current time we do not have a full release on the documentation that has been ordered for immediate release to public records and the material that has been liberated has been heavily redacted, skewing public controversy on whether or not it is only redacting text that is containing classified information regarding victims, and personal home addresses. However, there is some public speculation about whether these redactions are simply for victim protection, or the government potentially being involved in an act of non neutrality. 

Winding down on this topic, it is important to account that the United States government generally is not permitted under any means to have a favor for one side of a public debate and must maintain professionalism, and follow the oath of which those sworn in recited. 

This country was created and born with the idea of democracy, accountability, and fairness for all men, and as stated many times, God creates all men equal. And the United States has used this example numerous times as the underlying spirit of America and it has always been the historical context this country has been founded on.

The government is in place to do nothing more or nothing less than govern and maintain the statue of the constitution of which it was founded, it is in place to maintain peace, and to always take the steps to ensure the proper structure of the constitution while keeping personal views completely out of decisions made within the courts to maintain fair trial for all involved and the protection of judges within the court for reasons of confidentiality.

Viewpoint Discrimination — Wikipedia

Viewpoint Discrimination — The First Amendment Encyclopedia (MTSU)

Jeffrey Epstein — Wikipedia

Death of Jeffrey Epstein — Wikipedia

Lolita Express (aircraft) — Wikipedia

DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report on 2006–2008 Epstein Investigation

DOJ Statement on Epstein Files Redactions

DOJ Press Release: 3.5 Million Pages Released Under Epstein Files Transparency Act

CNN: Justice Department's Heavy-Handed Redactions Leave No One Happy