The new documentary MLK/FBI is scheduled to be released in select theatres and on digital and cable streaming services on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Jan 15, 2021. The film will take a deep look into the FBI’s counter-intelligence program that was spearheaded to dismantle the Civil Rights Movement. The U.S. government used all kinds of tactics to try and assassinate King’s character, including taped phone conversations and surveillance. Fearing the rise of a Black messiah, FBI officials once declared, “We must mark him now as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation…”
IFC Films released a statement describing MLK/FBI as an “essential expose of the surveillance and harassment of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (labeled by the FBI as the “most dangerous” Black person in America), undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover and the U.S. government. Based on newly discovered and declassified files, as well as revelatory restored footage, the documentary explores the government’s history of targeting Black activists.”
The project is directed by Emmy Award winner and Oscar nominee Sam Pollard. Some of Pollard’s previous exposés and works have included Four Little Girls, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Slavery by Another Name, Sammy Davis, Jr.: I Gotta Be Me, and Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children.
Speaking about his latest project, Pollard told Variety, “I had spent a lot of time doing films about the Civil Rights Movement, working from ‘Eyes on the Prize’ to ‘The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow’, to ‘Slavery by Another Name.’ But I had never thought about looking into the relationship that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had in terms of trying to undercut and destroy Dr. King’s reputation. And it wasn’t until 2017 when my producer Ben Hedin read this book by David Garrow about the FBI and Martin Luther King that, all of a sudden, it became clear to him—and to myself—that this should be a film.”
Watch the trailer below.
