“I love America,” filmmaker Sam Pollard asserts, interviewed by The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, “but it’s a complicated, fucked up place.” The occasion was the opening of his latest documentary, MLK/FBI, released in time for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day; the interview from the fall, predated the events of January 6 that more than anything proves the statement true. As is the case with other films he’s worked on, Eyes on the Prize II and 4 Little Girls among them, Pollard revels in complicated, teaching “Anything in America is layered in complexity.”
MLK was complicated, and maybe the lesson of his much-deserved heroic legacy, is that heroes best be understood as great, if flawed, humans. Their foibles make their greatness greater.
J. Edgar Hoover went after Rev. Dr. King with a vengeance. Under surveillance by the FBI, MLK was found to be a womanizer, and the agency tried to discredit Dr. King because he was not monogamous. Seems quaint today. Aware that he was being wiretapped, Dr. King never knew how far they would go. “Any black person who was speaking up was a threat,” said Pollard. The FBI gave the tapes to
Coretta Scott King. Pollard worried, in presenting the tapes, a revelation of MLK/FBI: would he get push back from the King family? Would Dr. King’s legacy be tarnished? As we celebrate MLK this week, said Pollard, his legacy is enhanced. “It is all the more amazing how much he accomplished.”
As to Sam Pollard’s accomplishment, MLK/FBI was shot as the world was closing down in a pandemic, and a rough cut was completed in May; the film was done in early July. On Saturday, the International Documentary Association will give Sam Pollard a career achievement award.
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