Mitchell admits to a small dose of white man's guilt, too. But the bigger motivation for his work is simply to get to the truth. It's just my sense of belief that the South should do the right thing. Murder is murder-the passage of time doesn't change that fact. However, the passage of time has indeed made it difficult for some of the atrocities of the civil rights era to be avenged.
Witnesses die or forget, and evidence disappears.
Another problem related to reviving old civil rights crimes is public resistance to reliving the past. But first, he had to educate himself about the past. At the time the movie was released, Mitchell was a court reporter for The Clarion-Ledger , the largest newspaper in Mississippi. Mitchell had no particular background in civil rights, and it bothered him that he was unaware of the real events that inspired the movie. According to Mitchell's sources, the Sovereignty Commission had obtained names of Freedom Summer participants-possibly including those murdered in Philadelphia.