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 African Americans were more susceptible to communist influence. But Hoover’s FBI, as Murch and other historians argue in the documentary, was also motivated by a lasting American preoccupation with unfettered Black male sexuality, which they could not disconnect from Black political aspiration. Such anxieties were only enhanced when King’s stature and methodologies earned him the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.Both King and Hoover have taken on mythic proportions in American popular history, and the documentary grapples with the image and reality of both in useful ways. Insight comes from a select group of historians: Murch, David Garrow, and Beverly Gage, alongside some of King’s closest allies: activist, politician, and diplomat Andrew Young, and King’s lawyer and advisor, Clarence Jones. For the majority of the film, all contribute simply via audio, their faces not revealed until late in the film. The bulk of the documentary’s powerful and engaging visuals intersperse newsreel footage with television appearances by King or Hoover, as well as a range of clips from mid-century Hollywood films that centered on and glorified the Cold War FBI.Inspired by historical research first published in the early 1980s, in particular David Garrow’s book, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (1981), Pollard’s film confirms for a wider audience the scale and impact of the bureau’s actions towards King. Like Shaka King’s recent Academy Award-winning feature film, Judas and the Black Messiah, MLK/FBI reflects a wider public reckoning with the unsavory nature of much of the bureau’s work, especially when it came to the surveillance and undercover infiltration of radical groups in the turbulent 1960s. Such efforts are a marked change from films such as Mississippi Burning (1988), which framed FBI agents as the heroes of the era, displacing Black activists to propagate national redemption. In 2014’s Selma, FBI intel served as an effective narrative tool, punctuating the visuals with King’s travel schedule, correspondence, and meetings. Subtly alerting the viewer to the extent to which King was under surveillance when leading the campaign for voting rights in 1965, director Ava DuVernay nevertheless implies a value to these sources. FBI files provide filmmakers, historians, and, increasingly, anyone with internet access, with information that we should not have, but which enables us to piece together key aspects of King’s life and schedule. Pollard’s film tackles the question of complicity head on, eventually offering Gage’s conclusion that such sources help historians to do their “duty,” and, in this case, better understand King “the man.”Recent controversy, sparked when Garrow himself placed King as a spectator to a violent 1964 rape in a 2019 article, has interrogated the value of FBI sources that the documentary shows were gathered to discredit King and destabilize the civil rights movement.1 Garrow’s evidence, a handwritten annotation on an FBI summary report (currently available to researchers) drawn from audio recordings (unavailable to researchers until at least 2027), drew outrage from many historians and King allies, who questioned how Garrow could unreservedly accept such a source.2 Murch repeats much of that criticism in the documentary, her words interspersed amongst Garrow’s continued commitment to the source’s relevance. Though the documentary never sides with either party, viewers aware of the controversy will no doubt be transfixed by the long pause Garrow takes before answering the question, “What is your responsibility as a historian when dealing with someone like MLK?” The first moment a “talking head” is actually seen onscreen, this is a powerful introduction to the faces and ethics behind the voices heard over the course of the documentary, which has otherwise immersed viewers only in historical news clips or promotional and Hollywood footage of upstanding FBI agents.It is fascinating to consider how such positive imagery influenced public perception of the bureau in the mid-twentieth century, legitimizing its deeply unsettling surveillance operations, escalating, in King’s case, with an infamous letter urging the civil rights leader to commit suicide. Described in Pollard’s film by recent FBI Director James Comey as the darkest moment in FBI history, such horrors have often been attributed to the specific priorities and fixations of the man who developed and led the bureau for forty-eight years. Indeed, J. Edgar Hoover readily serves as a personification of the bureau, but Murch argues that fixating on his excesses and paranoia obscures the fact that his “attitudes have been core to how the racial order operates in the US.” Garrow concurs that Hoover was very much “a part of the mainstream political order.” Much of the documentary’s lingering power therefore comes not from the revelations of FBI conduct, which will no doubt make most viewers wince, but its reminder that fewer than 20 percent of Americans sided with King in 1964, after Hoover rendered him “the most notorious liar in the country.” In response, King detailed a range of murders and attacks on African Americans and civil rights workers across the South in the preceding years, none of which had led to arrests. In doing so, King not only questioned the investigative prowess of the bureau, but the lack of value it placed on the lives of those who challenged America’s racial order.The vilification that King received in his own lifetime will come as a shock to viewers accustomed to the heroic status of a man now memorialized through a federal holiday and an elaborate monument next to the National Mall. But King’s place in the pantheon of American heroes was anything but likely when he was assassinated in 1968, and his hallowed status today reflects a rehabilitation of how he is remembered, rather than a marked change in racial politics. It is perhaps with this popular understanding of King in mind that Pollard highlights the more “radical” aspects of King’s life and philosophy, in particular his criticism of the Vietnam War, which cost him his relationship with President Lyndon Johnson, and the Poor People’s Campaign that took up the final eighteen months of his life and further implied the failure of Johnson’s policies, this time domestic. Scenes of King laughing and joking in the early 1960s are pertinently juxtaposed with the obvious signs of exhaustion and depression that marked his later speeches and appearances, as the weight of white America’s failures, Black America’s frustrations, and character assassinations from the FBI, national press, and many former allies took their toll. In sum, Pollard provides a welcome and lasting insight into King’s career, the FBI’s pursuit of him, and the lingering vestiges of white supremacy that marked not only the events in question, but the nation’s capacity to properly interrogate them.