'MLK/FBI' Humanizes A Civil Rights Icon's Legacy

A year ago the official Twitter account of the Federal Bureau of Investigation tweeted, "Today, the FBI honors the life and work of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." It was accompanied by a photo of the FBI Academy's reflecting pool, where a quote from King is etched in stone: "The time is always right to do what is right."

This wasn't the first time the FBI sent out a statement honoring the slain civil rights leader on the holiday that bears his name, and the responses to the ostensible hypocrisy of it all were no less colorful than they had been in previous years: expletive-filled kiss-offs, angry memes, and links or screenshots from articles detailing the agency's notoriously relentless surveillance of King in the final years of his life. Few took the FBI's "honor" seriously, because why would they? In the 1960s, the organization, led by its director J. Edgar Hoover, made active attempts to dismantle King's work and influence.

This is neither new nor little-known information, but that doesn't render Sam Pollard's documentary MLK/FBI, now streaming on demand, less essential. Working with recently declassified documents from the National Archives which reveal a deeper sense as to the extent and insidiousness of the agency's surveillance, the film aims to restore dimensions to the now-flattened image of King, who today is often reduced to iconography and erroneously viewed by many as having been a noncontroversial figure during his lifetime.