This story is a selection from the March issue of Smithsonian magazine. We have to tell our young people, do not date in the Soso area. So I went and did Hunger Games, but always keeping an eye on this. If you point out that Newt distributed food to starving people, and was known as the Robin Hood of the Piney Woods, they’ll tell you he married a black, like that trumps everything. Scruffy and rail-thin with piercing blue eyes and a full beard, he looks like he subsists on Confederate Army rations and the occasional squirrel. But the sacred rite of hunting season was underway, and the landowner didn’t want visitors disturbing the deer in the area. It was reputed to be fiercely racist and conservative, even by Mississippi standards, and it had been a hotbed for the Ku Klux Klan. She thinks he relished being a soldier. I tell people this movie is my academic midlife crisis.”, In Hollywood, he says, the executives were extremely supportive of his research, and the script that he finally wrestled out of it, but they balked at financing the film. Was this review helpful to you? “It never existed.”. 37, 73, 109. Calling themselves the Knight Company after their captain, Newton Knight, they set up headquarters in the swamps of the Leaf River, where, legend has it, they declared the Free State of Jones. Dorothy Knight Marsh and Florence Knight Blaylock are the great-granddaughters of Newt and Rachel. “We’ve come to terms with who we are,” says Blaylock. If anything, Gary Ross has eliminated most of the real-life incidents which dealt with Newton Knight's own actions on behalf of freedmen, probably to make the film more palatable to the radical left who, like the extreme right-wing can never be satisfied anyway. “A lot of people find it easier to forgive Newt for fighting Confederates than mixing blood.”. “Down here, that’s like naming your son Adolf Hitler Collins,” said Moulds. Free State of Jones, written and directed by Gary Ross (The Hunger Games, Seabiscuit, Pleasantville), tells the story of the curious settlement of Jones County, Mississippi. For this cause alone we have been treated as savages instead of freeman by the rebel authorities. “We have close relatives who won’t even look at us,” says Blaylock, the older sister, who was often taken for Mexican when she lived in California. “Blacks and whites date each other in high school now, and they don’t think it’s a big deal,” said Moulds. 28 talking about this. After he and Serena separated—they never divorced—Newt Knight caused a scandal that still reverberates by entering a common-law marriage with Rachel and proudly claiming their mixed-race children. Cox, an animated 71-year-old radio and television announcer with a long white beard, welcomed me into a small office crammed with video equipment and Confederate memorabilia. “I voted for Obama, I hunt and I love guns. He kept no diary and gave only one interview near the end of his life, to a New Orleans journalist named Meigs Frost. “It makes it relevant today. Those views were not unusual in Jones County. After the Civil War, Knight took up with his grandfather’s former slave Rachel; they had five children together. After Rachel died, Newt and Georgeanne had children. The men face off against the Union army, leading to a very bloody fight. The State of Mississippi still incorporates the Confederate flag in its state flag... and social justice warriors are quibbling about degrees of "white saviordom"? Rated R for brutal battle scenes and disturbing graphic images, Netflix Added 74 New Movies And 31 New TV Shows This Week, Netflix Added 45 New Movies/TV Shows Today, Netflix in October: Here’s Everything Coming and Going (Video), Amazon’s Black Employee Network Recommended Watching, Everything Coming to Netflix in October 2020, Most Anticipated Film: Summer 2016 Edition, Midnight Screenings: Independence Day: Resurgence/Free State of Jones. After many decades of living in the outside world, they are back in Soso, Mississippi, dealing with prejudice from all directions. That spring was the high-water mark of the rebellion against the Rebels. Admirer of Newt Knight ’ s daughter by another white man was convicted being. All rights reserved ), ( © 2015 STX Productions, LLC with the five ( six... 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