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MLK/FBI (Sam Pollard, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-11-13 18:31:38 +0000 UTC
The documentary as preamble, or perhaps as prolepsis. It is understandable that every generation requires its reintroduction to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., given the active myth-making that surrounds him. King's calls for racial justice are customarily severed from his equally emphatic demands for economic equality, which makes him a suitable hero for Americans across the political spectrum. After all, right-wing Republicans routinely claim King as one of their own, despite their opposition to virtually everything he stood for.
But MLK/FBI is mostly a speculative documentary about all the personal information that the FBI collected on King through J. Edgar Hoover's obsessive surveillance of him, which was eventually expanded into COINTELPRO. Bits of this defamatory material have slipped out over the years, but the entire file won't be declassified until 2027, a fact Pollard mentions only at the end of the film. So the function of MLK/FBI seems to be a halfhearted assertion that we shouldn't be upset or disappointed when we learn, conclusively, that King was into orgies and/or kinky sex.
The main sticking point in the allegedly forthcoming revelations has to do with King's supposed observation of a rape. As scholars in the documentary discuss, the assertion that King was present at said crime is based entirely on FBI agents' highly biased interpretations of audio recordings, and there is no guarantee that the voice on the recording is King's. Nevertheless, if this proves to be true -- that on some level, King was an unsavory character -- what does this tell us? Does it undo the historical work that he did? If anything, it will perhaps provide the ultimate test-case for cancel culture, which could be productive in itself.
