An exhausted, conflicted hero

best way to remember someone is as a human, faults and all. Such is the careful result of

Peter Kunhardt’s empathetic and freshly revealing documentary.

Zeroing in on the last few years of King’s life, it acquaints viewers with a leader privately mired in self-doubt, who is physically and mentally exhausted by his own movement and challenged by the contradictory forces that threaten to undermine the progress already made. “The most difficult time in his life was the 18 months before the assassination,” says Clarence Jones, King’s personal lawyer.

Without any biographical sketching or preamble,

deliberately skips ahead to a low moment in King’s story –well after the 1963 March on Washington, after Selma. Almost symbolically, the archival footage seen here is no longer the crisp black-and-white film of King’s zenith; overnight, it seemed, a different kind of 1960s arrived, in a vivid yet imperfect rainbow of colour films.

African-American activism began to run counter to King’s resolute message of non-violence and it was all he could do, from 1966 to 1968, to stay the course he charted. As others urged forceful tactics and riots became commonplace in headlines, King was surprised to find himself being occasionally heckled DOOMED: Dr Martin Luther King Jr Mississippi, at the Meredith March in

Picture