Victoria E. Bynum: A New Glimpse of the Cinematic Free State of Jones

We welcome to the blog today a guest post by Victoria E. Bynum, author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War. Across a century, Bynum reinterprets the cultural, social, and political meaning of Mississippi’s longest civil war, waged in the Free State of Jones, the southeastern Mississippi county that was home to a Unionist stronghold during the Civil War and home to a large and complex mixed-race community in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Featured below is a crosspost from Bynum’s blog, Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners. In her post, Bynum shares behind-the-scene photos from the movie The Free State of Jones, which is scheduled for release early next year.

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The movie The Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey as Newt Knight and Gugu MBatha-Raw as Rachel Knight, is scheduled for release on March 11, 2016. Almost a year previous to that day of projected release, the following photos were taken on the movie’s set in Covington, Louisiana. You’ll likely recognize the director, Gary Ross, of Hunger Games and Seabiscuit fame. Perhaps you’ll recognize the Confederate officer and nurse too!

And for your listening pleasure, I give you “Jones County Jubilee,” a musical version of the Free State of Jones by Doctor G and the Mudcats.

Victoria E. Bynum is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history at Texas State University, San Marcos. She is author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies and Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. Her book The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War is now available.