The Last White Knight

About The Film

Decades after a violent run-in with the Ku Klux Klan, a Jewish civil rights activist returns to Mississippi to understand his assailant, and examine the state of racism and race relations in the New South.

Emmy Award-winning Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman was volunteering with a 1960s voter registration drive in the segregationist town of Greenwood when he was punched in the head by Klansmen Byron “Delay” de la Beckwith, the son of the man convicted of assassinating NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Without casting judgment, the liberal Saltzman sits down for a riveting conversation with the bigoted Beckwith, now a seemingly likable and wizened old man, to explore the possibility of reconciliation. Additional interviewees include singer, actor and activist Harry Belafonte; actor and Mississippi native Morgan Freeman; and an FBI agent who reveals close ties between the police and white supremacists of the time. Cleverly designed animation sequences effectively illustrate past episodes of the civil rights era.