This weekend I rented In the Heat of the Night, the 1967 classic starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Rod Steiger). 

The plot: Poitier plays a Philadephia, Pennsylvania homicide detective named Virgil Tibbs who visits his mother in a small Mississippi town named Sparta.  He rises early one morning to catch an early train back to Pennsylvania, and waits at the depot.  That night a murder also takes place in Sparta, and the local police fan out to look for suspects.  They come upon Tibbs in the depot, search him, find several hundred dollars in his wallet, and haul him down to the station for questioning.  However, once the local police chief (Steiger) discovers who Tibbs is, he asks Tibbs to stay and help solve the case.

Why, you might ask, was Tibbs immediately deemed a suspect in a murder?  Because Tibbs is a black man carrying a lot of money, and it's small town Mississippi in the 1960s.

The racism portrayed in the movie is ugly, probably a little too exagerated but not by much.  I say that because I know I encountered similar attitudes about race when I grew up in a small Mississippi town twenty years after the shooting of this film.

But what's interesting is how times have changed.  Mimi and I watched part of this movie with our children, and at one point I was trying to explain to Wilson the plot of the movie and that the bad guys in the movie (local whites who don't like the idea of a black man operating under the color of law) were trying to kill someone.  When he asked "Who, Daddy?" I waited for the next scene in which Poitier had a part and then pointed and said, "Him."

Wilson replied, "You mean they're trying to kill the President?"  Apparently, Wilson thought the young Poitier bore a resemblance to our President Obama. 

But I was struck by how things have changed in Mississipppi since the movie was shot (actually, the movie was filmed in Hammond, Louisiana, but you understand).  The "Mississippians" in the movie couldn't conceive of a black man being a police officer (and that was probably true of many white Mississippians in the 1960s); my Mississippi son forty-three years later thinks nothing of a black man being President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world.  It's all he's ever known.

I don't see how this change can by any reasonable person be considered a bad thing.  Certainly, no one in my family judges anyone completely on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin (which is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s restatement of 1 Samuel 16:7), yet there can be no doubt that the times, to paraphrase Mr. Dylan, have been a-changin'.