Sam Pollard (2020)
This documentary has exactly the right title. The oblique stroke linking the letters expresses the spine of MLK/FBI – the continuing surveillance of one set of initials by the other, which Sam Pollard uses as a launch pad for mini-biographies of Martin Luther King Jr and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The visual narrative consists almost entirely of film and still photographs, along with occasional shots of recently declassified documents from the US National Archives. (For the viewer, these documents are a stylistic device rather than a source of information: the pages appear as hard-to-read white text on black ground and don’t stay on screen for long.) Until the last few minutes of MLK/FBI, Pollard eschews talking heads to interpret the evidence of the news footage.
Not talking voices, though – when one starts to speak its owner’s name usually pops up at the bottom of the frame. With plenty else for the eye to keep up with, this technique could have been distracting and the voices confusing but Pollard sensibly rations the contributors to eight (and a couple of them make only one or two comments). They include the academics Beverly Gage and Donna Murch, the writer and broadcaster David Garrow, the journalist Marc Perrusquia, and two people who knew or worked closely with Martin Luther King: Andrew Young, a leading member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and future US Ambassador to the UN in the Carter administration) and Clarence Jones, King’s lawyer, speechwriter and close friend. The remaining voices belong to former FBI employees, Charles Knox and James Comey. In the conclusion to MLK/FBI, we briefly see all the contributors except for Perrusquia and Comey.
The last-named, thanks to his prominence in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election and the circumstances of Trump’s firing of him the following spring, is one of the better-known FBI Directors of recent decades. Comey’s profile doesn’t begin to compare, however, with that of J Edgar Hoover, who has a major role in Pollard’s story. Hoover’s extraordinary longevity as the man in charge of the FBI – from 1924[1] until his death in 1972 – makes it easy for Pollard to make use of FBI-related material from outside the timespan of its investigation of MLK, and for this still to qualify as a portrait of the contemporary FBI regime. Two types of filmic material feature in MLK/FBI: as well as abundant news archive, there are clips from Hollywood dramas, of different vintages, some of them centred on the FBI and heroising its G-men. The clips have a distinct B-movie flavour but not all these films were made on the cheap. The period during which the Bureau kept its eyes and ears on King saw the release of, for example, The FBI Story (1959). A Warner Bros production, running two-and-a-half hours, it was directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starred James Stewart.
The archive footage of MLK starts in the mid-1950s and continues to the end of his life in April 1968. The FBI’s surveillance of him, which covers the same period, appears to have started in light of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: ‘We must mark him now as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation,’ according to an internal memo. At the start, the Bureau was chiefly concerned with connections between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the (white) businessman and lawyer Stanley Levison. An adviser to and friend of King, Levison himself had been under FBI investigation since the early 1950s thanks to his involvement with the American Communist Party. The focus on King changed when wire taps on hotel rooms he stayed in revealed his extramarital affairs, offering an opportunity to undermine his moral leadership within the Civil Rights movement. As one of the contributing voices points out, this shift from the explicitly political to the sexual in the interpretation of African-American threat feels like a reflection of inveterate white fear of the Black man as a figure of carnal menace. (Pollard accompanies this part of the narrative with an apt excerpt from The Birth of a Nation.)
In the final summing up, David Garrow describes the FBI as ‘a part of the mainstream political order’. By this stage, he hardly needs to do so. The characterisation of King as sexual bogeyman cum moral hypocrite may have been intensified by Hoover’s personal preoccupations and pathology but MLK/FBI convincingly shows that the FBI was no rogue outfit made in the image of its singular, longstanding head. The film makes clear both that a good deal of the Bureau’s activity wasn’t top secret, and the strength of its popularity. An opinion poll taken when ill feeling between Hoover and King became public showed 17% support for the latter against 50% for the FBI. The large cast of The FBI Story included, in a cameo appearance, J Edgar Hoover as Himself. That film also spawned a comic book and Pollard shows examples of similar publications. He creates a vivid picture of the sustained promotion of the Bureau in popular media.
To the frustration of Hoover and his colleagues, evidence of King’s sexual misbehaviour didn’t build up the head of steam they hoped for. The evidence could still damage his posthumous reputation, though. Some relevant textual material is already available but, as MLK/BFI makes clear, the tapes won’t follow suit until 2027. Pollard includes reference to a written report on one of the tapes, according to which King witnessed a female parishioner being raped in a hotel room by a fellow Baptist minister. Whoever added a manuscript note to the report overplayed his hand by claiming the tape revealed that ‘King looked on and laughed and offered advice’: how does an audiotape prove that someone ‘looked on’? Nevertheless, present-day perceptions of male abuses of power in relation to women make it hard to think that, only six years from now, the FBI’s secret recordings will do nothing to detract from MLK’s image.
It’s arguable Pollard doesn’t give enough attention to how and why the accusations against King didn’t gain traction during his lifetime – that his documentary is consequently able to ignore how appalled much of King’s churchgoing African-American support base would have been to learn of his maculate private life. In the main, though, MLK/FBI is fair-minded, as well as instructive and incisive. It describes MLK’s exceptional gifts but stops short of hagiography. It gives a detailed account of what more than one contributor terms the most shameful dirty tricks campaign in the FBI’s history (the competition for which superlative must be strong) while acknowledging elements of truth in its original suspicions about Stanley Levison.
Pollard starts with footage of the March on Washington in August 1963 and the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. He goes on to illustrate the versatility of King’s extraordinary eloquence in less expected contexts – a chat show, for instance. In a complementary way, the racial benightedness of the era comes through loud and clear not just in explicit abuse and disparagement. In a TV interview from what seems to be the mid-1960s, a white journalist asks King why he thinks ‘the Negro’ has found it harder than other immigrant groups to assimilate to American life. MLK keeps his cool in explaining that the other groups didn’t come to the country as slaves. In the same exchange, he refers to ‘thingification’ of Blacks, a phenomenon Pollard has shown in action in an earlier interview, in 1950s Alabama. This comprises footage of conversation between King and a (different) white interviewer just before they go on air – though conversation isn’t quite the right word. King, asking if there’ll be a brief dummy run, is meaningfully addressing his white interlocutor. The latter, with an off-handed reply, doesn’t even glance in King’s direction. Thingifying the Black man standing beside him comes naturally.
24 January 2021
[1] The organisation was called the Bureau of Investigation at the time of Hoover’s initial appointment. It added ‘Federal’ to its name in 1935.
