‘MLK/FBI’ explores agency’s pursuit of Martin Luther King
Mark Kennedy
There’s an iconic photograph of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that was taken as he triumphantly boarded one of the first integrated buses in Montgomery, Alabama.
It was 1956 and King looks out a window, firmly at the front of the bus, almost gazing toward his movement’s next big social hurdle. The image was taken by Ernest Withers, a key chronicler of the civil rights movement – and an FBI informant.
That the FBI wanted someone close and watching King is at the heart of director Sam Pollard’s engrossing documentary “MLK/FBI,” a film that artfully explains how the two sides of that slash came to be enemies.