Stream It Or Skip It: ‘MLK/FBI’ on Hulu, an Essential Documentary Offering a Contemporary Perspective on Well-Worn History

Now on Hulu, MLK/FBI is a quietly searing documentary chronicling J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance and smear campaign against Martin Luther King Jr. Anyone who’s paid attention to history knows the story, but likely not with the detail, clarity and modern context that director Sam Pollard provides with this film, which is based on declassified government documents. So the question here isn’t if you should watch it — hint: you should — but whether it’s merely watchable or downright essential.

MLK/FBI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “It’s the darkest part of the bureau’s history,” says former FBI director James Comey — an obvious statement maybe, but one that needs to be reiterated. And pointed reiteration seems to be the reason this documentary exists. It began in the 1950s, when King emerged as the leader of the American civil rights movement, and many white people, especially those with power like Hoover, didn’t like that a Black man held that honor. King’s famous March on Washington in 1963 cemented his status, inspiring Hoover to label King a Communist threat and open a file on the guy, a file he’d soon fill with sleazy stuff gathered from wiretaps, bugs and informants.

It’s no secret that King was no angel. His infidelities are famous now. The Commie connection — very loose, mind you — took a backseat to making the Baptist pastor look like a sexual deviant and therefore a hypocrite, but Hoover’s motives were always transparent. He and King had public spats and a closed-door meeting they maybe almost labeled a reconciliation, and those are generous terms. Hoover and his team assembled a salacious audiotape of King’s alleged extramarital activity, but media types, rightfully skeptical, didn’t bite on the leaks. So a copy was sent to King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, disrupting his personal life. King was clearly troubled and stressed, but he soldiered on, celebrating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and his Nobel Peace Prize.

Like I said, you should know this. Pollard assembles an array of historians, officials and King insiders and contemporaries to tell the story through a 21st-century lens; they speak over exclusively archival footage, and we don’t see their faces until the tail end of the film. But here’s the kicker: from our contemporary viewpoint, King was a flawed human being with, shall we say, appetites — as the saying goes, don’t you dare cast the first stone — but forever an inspiration and legend. Yet in the mid-1960s, Hoover’s POV was the popular one. Fifty percent of Americans polled agreed with him; MLK had the support of 17 percent. Popular culture depicted Black men as predatory “others” and troublemakers, threats to the moral order; law enforcement, the FBI, was depicted as square, upright citizens, clean and righteous. Propaganda comes in many forms. That’s the perspective — simplified in this review, thoroughly explored in the film — that Pollard brings to this frustrating story.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: MLK/FBI nicely dovetails with Judas and the Black Messiah — a fine double feature if you can handle that much anger and sadness in one evening. Stylistically, Pollard finds a happy medium between Ken Burns and Errol Morris (sans the Interrotron).

Performance Worth Watching: When we finally get to see the face of Clarence Jones, speechwriter and attorney for King, his face, furrowed with decades of sorrow and pain, tells the disappointing story of King’s marital indiscretions without a single word.

Memorable Dialogue: Historian Beverly Gage offers an incisive final word for the film: “This core fear and aggression toward African-Americans I think has a lot to dow with white people’s own conception of themselves, and the danger of Black people forcing a reckoning with the violence of America’s past.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Of course MLK/FBI is fascinating. The story, with its many reverberating tributaries, cuts to the heart of America’s darkness. Listen closely to what King says during archival media interviews presented in this film, and you’ll hear the same assertive terminology and core ideas of systemic racism that are the foundation of the Black Lives Matter movement. Read Gage’s statements above again if you need to connect the dots.

And then, take the scene in MLK/FBI, an archival person-in-the-street interview conducted by news media, in which a woman presents a photo of King attending “Commie training school.” The interviewer asks if that’s really “proof,” and she replies that she believes it’s proof, and King is therefore bad, anti-American. It stinks of the same propagandist conspiracy theories that stain American discourse and belief in 2021 (and is in fact less ludicrous than the Big Lie). There’s a moment where King says it’s cruel to ask a man without boots to pull himself up by his bootstraps; there’s another in which a commentator says King celebrated his wins but nonetheless pursued “real equality.” We see glimpses of the declassified documents that paint King as a “tomcat” engaging in “fornications” and “an orgy,” as well as an allegation scrawled in one margin that he stood in the room and laughed as a woman was raped. Gage makes a key point about the frame of reference of the FBI agents gathering the information — they stood firmly in line with Hoover’s skewed place of power and perceived righteousness — and states that we shouldn’t accept everything in the documents as necessarily true or false, but subjective observations.

These examples are key elements of Pollard’s narrative, which he wields like a well-honed blade. He maintains a steady, matter-of-fact tone — the story comes with built-in righteousness, so there’s no need to amplify it any further. MLK/FBI is a penetrating and intellectual presentation of history that we all could stand to revisit, right now.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Yes, MLK/FBI is downright essential.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch MLK/FBI on Hulu