How many times have i heard the aphorism that justice is "just us", meaning that justice is for the 'in group' and them alone. I had a lawyer, an expensive and successful lawyer tell me that juries were crapshoots and that since i was offered an alternative i ought to take it, even though i wanted to defend myself, this advice infuriated me. For we all have this righteous indignation at justice denied. This is Whoopi Goldberg's role as the widow of Medgar Evers, a woman deeply aware of "just us" denied.
This innate sense of justice is something we all seem to have early on, from the time our brothers get a little bit more than half of the candy bar, to the time we missed a B by just 1 point. When it comes to us, to our welfare, we have this (over)?developed sense of outrage, the sense of being unjustly accused, or wrongly shortchanged.
But this childish sense of fairness, of dividing candy bars and slices of pie, of getting our fair share of whatever, is where most of our senses of justice stay, never growing, never really maturing to a stage of real justice, just kindof stunted at the candybar stage. But it is a useful common feeling and our jury system deeply relies on both it and on average common sense, despite the complexity and increasing technicality of the law and evidence. It is this innate sense of human justice that the movie builds on, and from what the authors desired for us to grow out of, to a more mature form. They desire for us to grow out of this stunted "for just ourselves" (un)justice to justice for Medgar Evers.
His wife desired justice for him and his lost life, for his dreams that caused the bullet to fly, for the years his children lost their father and her his love.
However lots(maybe most) of people, not just the racist rightwing, but average, workaday people just want the evil of past days to go away, to get on with the rebuilding of a New South.
But a few, pitifully few, like the Asst. DA understand the higher definition of justice as more than a fair division of the spoils, a candy bar cut by one person and first choice to the other, more than material fairness. More than the personal, more than the selfish, more than the selfcentered me. The ADA grows into the role, he starts with a strong self identification with the victim, add to it the sense of the law developed as a lawyer and a good prosecutor. But something changed in the research, something was added to the mix, the racist murderer not just laughed at the law, not just flouted justice but he came to symbolize all the evil of the past that continued as remnants in the present. But he(Alec Baldwin) began to realize that ghosts need to be sung to sleep, and not just with the hymns to which armies marched, but with real songs of justice.
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