MLK/FBI

In his thor­ough doc­u­men­tary, direc­tor Sam Pol­lard metic­u­lous­ly maps out the FBI’s con­niv­ing oper­a­tion to desta­bilise the equal­i­ty mis­sion of Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Made up pre­dom­i­nant­ly of archive footage of Dr King’s ral­lies and var­i­ous scanned doc­u­ments, along­side voiceover inter­views with Bev­er­ly Gage, Don­na Murch, David Gar­row, Clarence Jones, Antho­ny Young and James Comey, this engross­ing film shows just how intent the Bureau were on plot­ting his downfall.

At one point in his life­time, King was her­ald­ed as ​‘the moral leader’ of Amer­i­ca, and it’s appar­ent that FBI Direc­tor J Edgar Hoover was intent on evis­cer­at­ing that per­cep­tion. The Bureau’s shad­ow­ing of King began because Hoover believed African-Amer­i­can peo­ple to be more sus­cep­ti­ble to com­mu­nism. Through 1955 t0 1958, the true extent of this sur­veil­lance was unknown to King and his sup­port­ers. Pol­lard tells these infu­ri­at­ing truths with­out frip­pery or sus­pense, ear­ly on high­light­ing how the FBI would infil­trate his hotels ahead of his arrival, instruct­ing the staff to allo­cate the bugged room to King.

Pol­lard goes on to exca­vate Hoover’s racist, sex­u­al obses­sion with King. The Bureau’s goal was to paint him as an anti-Amer­i­can fraud, and the record­ings of the Bap­tist min­is­ter engaged in numer­ous extra­mar­i­tal affairs fuelled this oper­a­tion. King’s pri­vate life was not only con­trary to his pub­lic image, but to Hoover’s own myth-mak­ing project of the upstand­ing Amer­i­can male. Hoover’s G‑men – cau­casian, Chris­t­ian, clean cut and obe­di­ent – are an endur­ing myth in Amer­i­can cul­ture. The film lays out how and why this pop­u­lar image was estab­lished by inter­weav­ing footage from The FBI Sto­ry and Big Jim McClain; scenes that could be tak­en from any copa­gan­da film or TV show today.

Most impor­tant­ly, Pol­lard high­lights the fact that in America’s col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion – even pri­or to DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation – Black men have always been anti­thet­i­cal to this image. Black male sex­u­al­i­ty is believed to be inher­ent­ly deviant and vio­lent, some­thing to be feared and restrained; Hoover’s hatred of King, this film empha­sis­es, was moti­vat­ed by fear and racism.

By refram­ing King’s sto­ry from the government’s per­spec­tive, Pol­lard is able to rec­ti­fy the lib­er­al lie that the civ­il right leader was always beloved. One news­reel clip dis­clos­es that after King and Hoover met face to face in 1964, 50 per cent of Amer­i­cans pre­ferred Hoover. When asked by a reporter, one man says of King, ​“If he is a human, he’s prob­a­bly the worst in the world.” Pol­lard reck­ons with the com­plex­i­ties of King beyond either a dei­fied peace leader or sub-human sex­u­al deviant (as char­ac­terised in life), or the amenable, kid friend­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary he has been immor­talised as.

Giv­en that the offi­cial tran­scripts on which it is based have only recent­ly been declas­si­fied (the audio itself is set to be unsealed in 2027), the very exis­tence of this doc­u­men­tary rais­es an impor­tant ques­tion: is it essen­tial to reveal the FBI’s sor­did activ­i­ties if it means poten­tial­ly reprop­a­gat­ing their agen­da? The pres­ence of this dis­cus­sion with­in the film, cou­pled with Pollard’s skil­ful assem­blage of footage, answers that ques­tion cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly. This inci­sive dis­sec­tion of the Bureau’s treat­ment of King is vital to under­stand­ing the sin­is­ter machi­na­tions of racism and sur­veil­lance which still inca­pac­i­tate African-Amer­i­cans today.

MLK/FBI is avail­able to watch from 15 Jan­u­ary via Dogwoof.