‘MLK/FBI’ Review: What Do We Do With Knowledge We Shouldn’t Have?
To look through the archives of history, we must first question the ethics of looking.
While producing any documentary, filmmakers must carefully consider the ways in which they represent the subjects they are following. This conflict in filmmaking is perhaps the most central question asked in the documentary MLK/FBI, directed by Sam Pollard. In the opening sequence, Yale professor and historian Beverly Gage questions “whether or not we are complicit in what the FBI was doing” when looking through declassified FBI surveillance archives of Martin Luther King, which contain invasive recordings and descriptions of his private life, of which more will be released in 2027. The main story of the film, however, is not the contents of the currently known archival material, or speculations on what the future archive holds. Instead, MLK/FBI asks what it is we are to do with this knowledge we shouldn’t have, and how politics and media came together to influence and challenge the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1960s.
In 2021, when Martin Luther King is largely remembered as a sanitized American hero who nobly fought for change, it may be jarring for some viewers to see how much push back there was against King during this era. The truth that must be confronted before anything else is that the Civil Rights Movement was not supported by a large portion of people in the United States during the 1960s and King was perceived to be “the most dangerous man in America” by the FBI. When compared to the pacifist image of King touted in public discourse today, it may be difficult to imagine someone, let alone an entire government agency describing King as dangerous, yet it is important to understand that a large portion of Americans during the 1960s saw the Civil Rights Movement as merely violent and disruptive. This view of protest as violent can be understood as a reaction to the way systems of power are disrupted when racist systems are challenged — the afterlife of these counter-reactions echo in our current day whenever media representations of Black Lives Matter protests discredit the calls for justice for being “violent” or “riotous.”
J. Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the FBI during the 1960s, embodied the widespread anti-civil rights mentality as he worked to discredit Dr. King and the movement he lead. The documentary begins to explore Hoover’s view of King by presenting his fear of leaders within the Civil Rights Movement being communist, yet this fear of communism would expand into a targeted mission to defile the public image of King. This mission would take the form of surveilling the civil rights leader while he was staying in hotels to gather explicit evidence of his extramarital sexual relationships, which would be used by the FBI to anonymously urge King to commit suicide in an infamous blackmail package.
While hearing more about the recordings and accounts we have already as a result of this surveillance, my mind returned constantly to the question Beverly Gage asks at the beginning of the film. Does the act of looking at these invasive archives re-commit the violence of the FBI? Is it unethical to see what this surveillance wrongfully produced? These of course are difficult questions to grapple with, yet the film responsibly focuses less on the gratuity of the archives and more on the conditions that made these archives possible. As disturbing as this history is, MLK/FBI urges us to look toward the ways in which this story is intertwined with the history of media representations of Black people and the government in the United States.
Pollard leans into the use of archival footage as the primary visual throughout the documentary, which points to the central role of media in this story of Dr. Martin Luther King and the FBI. Where a typical documentary shows the faces of the people interviewed for it, those interviewed in this film are not shown on screen until the final moments of the 1 hour and 44 minute run time. Instead, footage from the 60s, interviews of Martin Luther King, and films that were produced during the era invite us into the history that we are asked to confront. Films such as I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) and advertisements for the agency are presented to show how the FBI was represented in and utilized media to shape its public persona as a force for good, an image that Pollard admits he bought into during the 60s in an interview with Variety. This image of a strong FBI fighting the evils of communism contributed to public support for the agency, which gave the FBI much of the power to be an unrivaled entity of the U.S. government, able at times to overstep the law to achieve its goals. Just as pertinent, however, is the history of media representations of Black people in the U.S.
The film unpacks the importance of the FBI using King’s sexual actions to harm his image as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement by looking at the ways in which Black sexuality has been utilized in media to justify violence against Black people, namely by analyzing the historic 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Through an intricately structured exploration and depiction of this film that represents the KKK as heroes saving white women from Black men (represented by white men in blackface), it is clear to see how conceptions of Black male sexuality as predatory and deviant are both reflected and produced by way of The Birth of a Nation. What is most crucial to take away from the inclusion of this history within the story of MLK/FBI is that these representations within media have a material effect on the world that both creates the media and consumes it. The documentary asserts that the images that date back to the creation of Hollywood directly created and reinforced the conditions under which the “murder, exclusion, discrimination, and incarceration” of Black people is justified. By extension, this history is the context under which it is justifiable for the FBI to violently deny Martin Luther King the freedom of privacy in order to paint him as a sexual deviant to hurt both him and the Civil Rights Movement.
In the opening moments of MLK/FBI, there is a clip of Ronald Reagan stating “In the traditional motion picture story, the villains are defeated, the ending is a happy one. I can make no such promise for the picture you’re about to watch. The story isn’t over.” These words call us to see both the importance of media representation in the history this documentary lays out, and the truth of this history not being anywhere near complete. When we are made to confront images of FBI propaganda and the violently racist moving images that Hollywood was born out of, the idea of the traditional motion picture being one where the villains are defeated is complicated because we are made to recognize that there is a raveled politics a play in the creation of “heroes” and of “villains.” This documentary brings us to a place where truth is somewhere outside of the confines of “the traditional motion picture story.” We are made to see Dr. King, not as the saccharine figure he is widely presented as today, nor the villain the FBI sought to imagine him as, but rather as a man in all of his complexities. Beyond the legacy of Dr. King, we are also called to see in what ways is this story not over. How do we continue to live with the representations of the past? How do we look at archives and histories critically so as not to recreate violence? This film offers no easy answer, but rather does the hard work we too must engage in if we are to ever get closer to finding an answer.
MLK/FBI is currently available on demand.
