‘Just as relevant today.’ Biloxi filmmaker tells story of Bobby Kennedy’s Ole Miss visit

Mary Blessey, an independent filmmaker based in her hometown of Biloxi as well as New Orleans, has directed a documentary on a lesser-known slice of civil rights-era Mississippi history, called “You Asked For The Facts: Bobby Kennedy at the University of Mississippi.”

“I realized how much this film sheds light on so many important issues that are just as relevant today as they were back in 1966, when the story takes place,” said Blessey.

The film centers on U.S. Sen. Bobby Kennedy’s historic visit to Ole Miss and the student activists who made it possible.

Just four years after the enrollment of James Meredith, the university’s first Black student, a small group of students devised a plan to circumvent the school’s unconstitutional “speaker ban” and hold a speech and live Q&A session with the New York senator.

The organizers planned to have Kennedy expose the secret phone calls of Mississippi’s segregationist governor, Ross Barnett, with the Kennedy administration four years earlier.

Among the organizers was former Biloxi Mayor Gerald Blessey, Mary’s father.

“We staged this. Clearly, we were setting this thing up to get Barnett,” said Gerald Blessey in a film interview.

Despite hate mail, death threats and efforts to expel the organizers, Kennedy appeared before 6,000 people in Oxford on March 18, 1966.

Kennedy speaks candidly in his lengthy address, as viewers will hear firsthand from the previously unreleased archival footage of his appearance, along with audio of Barnett’s secret phone calls.

“I suppose I spoke to Governor Barnett… probably 25 times. He wanted the marshals to draw their guns… You asked for the facts,” Kennedy said in the archival footage.

“Progress requires a real reckoning with real history,” said Mary Blessey.

“We need to confront the history of people like Ross Barnett, for example — the huge damage caused by allowing people like that to be leaders.

We need to understand the ways in which those same ideologies manifest today and continue to cause harm.”

The film features exclusive interviews from those directly involved, including Mrs. Ethel Kennedy, James H. Meredith, Gov. William Winter, Judge Reuben Anderson, Judge Ed Ellington, Frank Thackston and many others.

“We need people of goodwill staying vigilant, staying active, relying on real facts and real evidence and refusing to be led by the ‘Ross Barnetts’ of the world, then and now,” said Mary Blessey.

“You look at all sides of issues in order to hopefully have truth be the victor. Everybody wins when justice is done. Justice is only done when truth is the victor,” said Gerald Blessey in the film.

Screenings and live discussions are scheduled throughout October in venues such as the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey, the San Diego International Film Festival in California, the Oxford Film Festival and The Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Oxford.

Due to COVID-19, festivals have adapted to virtual platforms.

How to watch

Facebook: You Asked For The Facts

Instagram: @forthefactsfilm

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJcDjmiE_Is