Sam Pollard’s acclaimed 2021 documentary explores the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, shedding light on the bureau’s motivations within an atmosphere of Cold War paranoia and distrust. Surveillance proved that King had not completely broken ties with suspected communist Stanley Levison, as urged by the John F. Kennedy administration, and that he was regularly unfaithful to his wife. Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover, already concerned by King’s meteoric rise, therefore began to wonder what else King might be hiding. The high points of the civil rights movement appear very different than usually understood when viewed through the bureau’s eyes, something historian Donna Murch intimates over footage of sprawling crowds gathered to watch King deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Hoover’s determination that King was unfit to lead Black America was rooted in a paternalistic, racist assumption that...

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