In Sam Pollard’s superb, infuriating documentary, “MLK/FBI,” Andrew Young quotes comedian and activist Dick Gregory: “If you’re Black and not slightly paranoid, you’re sick.” It’s a fitting line for a film about J. Edgar Hoover’s widespread surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from 1963 to April 4, 1968. Tapes of these wiretaps and bugs were turned over to the National Archives in 1972, and will be available for public consumption in 2027. In the meantime, we have this powerful, upsetting record of events based on
The FBI and Martin Luther King: From ‘Solo’ to Memphis by David J. Garrow. Pollard and editor Laura Tomaselli stitch together an incriminating mix of real-life footage and scenes from movies that served as law enforcement propaganda. Those images are supplemented by onscreen selections from FBI documents that paint a salacious picture of the civil rights leader they surveyed. Myth and legend are pushed aside, creating a human portrait of a gre
MLK/FBI Humanizes A Civil Rights Icon s Legacy knpr.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from knpr.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
When Colman Domingo was offered a part in Netflix s adaptation of
Ma Rainey s Black Bottom, he took a long, deep inhale. When he found out that it was celebrated director George C. Wolfe who would be at the helm, and that Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman had leading roles, he had heard enough. I said, ‘How much more do you want me to say yes? he recalls over Zoom from Los Angeles. I really wanted to be in the room with these artists, knowing that Denzel Washington was taking on the feat of getting August Wilson’s words out there in cinema.