Packed to the brim with historical documents and recently
declassified materials, Sam Pollard, documentarian and editor of Spike
Lee's films among many others (Mo' Better Blues, 4 Little Girls, Chisholm '72, Venus and Serena) brings us MLK/FBI,
a searing indictment of government surveillance and a smear campaign on
one of the most revered figures in American history. Based on David
Garrow's book The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr.: From Solo to Memphis, where
the author and King biographer accuses King of participating in a rape
in a hotel room in 1964, based on the declassified, handwritten memo
over FBI documents that is now on National Archive website.
With Trump's 'Law and Order' rhetoric rising amid nationwide protest against police violence and BLM movement during the worst pandemic in American history and the nation's top cop Bill Barr's threat to charge the racial justice protesters with sedition, MLK/FBI truly resonates now, more than ever.
Pollard gets it right by framing the film with King's rise as a leader of the Civil Rights movement from Birmingham, AL days, to March to Washington and his famous speech, to LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law, to him winning the Nobel Peace Prize, to his opposition to the Vietnam War and the Poor People's Campaign, to his assassination in 1968 against the backdrop of the FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the head of the bureau's Domestic Intelligence, Bill Sullivan, obsessing over 'the most dangerous negro in America' and figuring the way to 'neutralize' King.
Threatened by King's eminence as the leader of nationwide non-violence protests, Hoover, with RFK (then AG of New York and later the nation)'s blessings, ordered unprecedented surveillance on him, tapping his and his colleague's phones and bugging hotel rooms where he stayed. Hoover first wanted to tie him with the communists. Stanley Levison, a Jewish lawyer who served as King's advisor, has had a tie with the communist party. Media also played a big part creating the 'G-men' and FBI culture Hoover cultivated after his own image - a conservative Christian white jockey male. These government recruits were indoctrinated to see themselves as guardians of American way of life and perpetuate white dominance. Communists and their sympathizers were seen as direct threat to that racial hierarchy. It is amazing to see people still buy this belief, since we still witness this in this election cycle.
As the King is a communist narrative didn't bear any fruit, they then switched to more salacious material on his private life as these bugs turned up some goods on his extramarital affairs.
Interviews with the Civil Rights luminaries and King confidantes Andrew Young, Clearance Jones and historian Beverley Gage as well as David Garrow and unseen James Comey, Pollard poses a difficult question on how we handle information on a private life of a public figure, when the source is from a place as prejudiced and biased as Hoover's FBI.
Pollard also rightfully sheds a light on many uncomfortable truths. However a maligned Hoover is in history books, he was in charge of the FBI for 37 years until his death in 1972. He had ears of the so-called friends of the movement in the highest power - JFK, RFK and LBJ and conspired against King. LBJ and Hoover are even on tape discussing sordid private life of King and what to do about it.
It all came down to a boiling point after King received a Nobel Prize and Hoover called him a notorious liar. Johnson arranged the meeting with the two to diffuse the situation. There is footage of King emerging from the meeting saying the polite conversations he had with Hoover. However, obsessed Hoover played the black deviant card, which dates all the way back to D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and sent a threatening letter guised as one of his black supporters with a tape recording of one his hotel room encounters to his wife, Coretta Scott King.
Emotional impact must have been immeasurable to King family. But there were so much work to be still done- Selma, The Voting Rights Act and protests against the Vietnam War.
Pollard is quick to note that general public was on the side of Hoover, not King. Even Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an influential black organization and integral part of the Civil Rights Movement, was not on board with King's stance against the war. He didn't have any business having an opinion. Sounds familiar?
MLK/FBI strongly resonates with what we are going through as a nation right now: Hoover's notion of racial hierarchy is still very much in place in law enforcement mindset as police unions endorsing a candidate whose rhetoric is nothing but racist, so as irrational fear of anything that sounds like 'communism' or 'socialism', putting way too much emphasis on personal lives of elected officials, the list goes on and on. But more importantly, it resonates that no other social movement since King and the Civil Rights Movement, we had a real possibility of a fundamental change in this country, than Black Lives Matter Movement. Those sordid FBI tapes on King are sealed until 2027. We can deal with Martin Luther King Jr. a man then and there. It's his victories over insurmountable odds that we need to take lessons from and be hopeful, not the smear campaign designed to take our eyes off the ball.
Dustin Chang is a freelanc