A scene in the 2000 movie Freedom Song, set fifty-some years before the movie was made, illuminates the dominant culture of Mississippi in the century leading up to 1964. A small black boy of about five, Owen, wanders into the “whites only” luncheonette at the bus terminal of “Quinlan,” a fictional representation of McComb, Mississippi. His father, Will Walker (Danny Glover) has been talking for a few moments with the baggage handler, a friend and former customer at his gas station. The baggage handler, like others in the black community, has been warned away from patronizing Walker’s store because he has questioned the system of racial segregation. You can’t push against them, his friend warns Walker. Now he discovers that his son has literally stepped into the middle of that system, for Owen is being gently held by a grinning young white man in the luncheonette. In the ensuing scene, fraught with tension, the whites—still grinning—force Walker to spank his son right there, in public, to “teach him” his place, which is never in a “whites only” establishment. Of course, Will Walker is being taught his place, subordinate to the smirking white guys in the luncheonette.

The humiliation of Will Walker and his son might be a minor moment in the arrangements of segregation: no one is evicted, arrested, beaten, or murdered. No churches are burned, no homes bombed, no black men shot. However, looked at more closely, the scene dramatizes the daily operations of racial power. Will and Owen are unmanned and enraged by their very lack of control in this everyday incident. A never-stated, always-present threat of heavier violence underwrites segregation here. If Will doesn’t agree to chastise his son, the whites will cheerfully provide the lesson. The economic consequences of expressing even the slightest qualm about the system—here threatening Will’s customers—also helps maintain segregation. In the film, which concerns the development of the freedom movement in southwestern Mississippi, the most repressive area of the state, the scene quietly evokes the racist burden of the status quo.