The secret life of Martin Luther King Jr is explored in Sam Pollard’s doc, “MLK/FBI.” Seen through the lens of an FBI adamant at destroying King’s credibility back in 1963, we learn of the various ways Hoover’s hoodlums managed to infiltrate King’s inner circle and spy on his personal life, sneakily recording hundreds of hours of personal encounters with his mistresses in hotel rooms.
By exposing King as a flawed individual, the FBI hoped to humiliate him and weaken his credibility as a civil rights leader. The problem J. Edgar Hoover’s dirty cops had was one quite relevant to today’s media entanglements with Trumpian politics; despite the FBI seeking to make King’s secret life public knowledge by distributing copies of the King tapes to numerous media outlets, the media establishment had a calculated interest in protecting King. They were on the reverend’s side, they had their own political biases and had no intention of damaging the Civil Rights movement by publishing the FBI’s dirt.
This somewhat absorbing documentary from Pollard doesn’t cover all the bases of this conspiracy, it inundates you with an assault of information, but doesn’t quite manage to create a cohesive narrative. Based on the book “The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From ‘Solo’ to Memphis,” Pollard takes the source material, but is hampered down by a lack of fully-known insight into the King surveillance. There’s a lot of hearsay in “MLK/FBI,” stories that are most likely factual, insinuations that go along with the motives of the parties depicted, but that’s it. The full story is in those FBI tapes, but you won’t hear a moment of what’s in them, just speculation, as in 1977, a federal court order placed them in a vault in the National Archives, where they’ll remain under seal until February 2027.
Using personal photographs and crisp b-roll archival footage, we learn of a full-on establishment assault against King – it wasn’t just the FBI, also cooperating in the sting were Attorney General Robert. F. Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson. And yet, because of the innumerable loose strands, “MLK/FBI” only leaves you feeling half-satisfied about the story being told. King’s murder gets tackled near the end, but was it the result of a government conspiracy? Again, all we get are insinuations and not enough facts to back that up.
“MLK/FBI” leaves you wanting more, but the story it does tell is a semi-gripping one, a chapter in the story of how a powerful American establishment, and a set of forces within that hierarchy, went out of its way to crush an important progressive leader.