Documentarian Pollard on ‘MLK/FBI’
On Monday, Americans will celebrate the birth of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as part of a national holiday. Countless streets in our nation’s cities bear the murdered civil rights leader’s name.
But, as Sam Pollard recounts in his new film “MLK/ FBI,” King was not popular during his lifetime, in part because his passive resistance techniques were so effective at combating segregation during the 1950s and ’60s.
In his lifetime, King was actually less popular than his eventual adversary, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
“I kind of assumed that King was very popular in America, but he wasn’t,” Pollard says by phone from New York.
During the ’60s, Hoover’s FBI monitored hours of King’s telephone conversations and pried into his personal life, especially the pastor’s extramarital affairs. One of Hoover’s white subordinates, Head of Intelligence William C. Sullivan, even wrote a letter claiming to be a Black supporter with groan-inducing phony “Black” language (it’s on Wikipedia, if you can stomach it).
Hoover received his authorization in 1963, from then Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Hoover was alarmed that King adviser and friend Stanley David Levison, a New York lawyer, was a Communist. While the Bureau’s surveillance revealed Levison had left the party in 1956 and that he posed a negligible threat to national security, Hoover hoped to use his information to discredit King.
“The idea that Dr. King had been a close confidant of somebody who had been a Communist was enough to raise the alarm bells for J. Edgar Hoover,” Pollard says. “He was obsessed with Communism basically destroying American society. He was obsessed with the idea that a Black man like Dr. King could have such a strong and positive hold on many Americans, African Americans and white people [trying] to change the directory about what this country was all about. He was obsessed with any organization or any individual that was going to undermine his notion of American democracy. With the creation of COINTELPRO [Counter Intelligence Program], he was watching Dr. King, the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party.”
As time has illustrated, King’s calls to end segregation, the Vietnam War and poverty of all kinds weren’t a security threat. In the film, King himself explains to a young Dan Rather, “I think it’s amazing that so few Negroes have turned to Communism in light of their desperate plight. I think it is one of the amazing developments of the 20th century.”
While having affairs is questionable behavior for a Baptist pastor like King, Hoover’s own love life leads to some intriguing questions. Hoover never married and lived with Associate Director Clyde Tolson.
While it’s easy to assume Hoover and Tolson were in a relationship that would have been illegal at the time, unless some Hoover-like surveillance emerges on the two men.
“You’ve got to be careful with that kind of material,” Pollard warns. “There’s nothing factual. There’s no audio tapes. There’s no smoking gun. ”
OLD NEWS
Pollard and I spoke a week after violent riots at the Capitol in Washington. As “MLK/ FBI” demonstrates, the divisions in America that led to the attack on Congress last week are hardly new. The documentary is based primarily on archival footage. In the film, supporters of segregation proudly declare their unwavering support for the policy and refer to the pastor as “Martin Lucifer King.” The people in this footage don’t seem eager to reach across the aisle.
King’s detractors even show off mimeographed conspiracy theories that look like the LOLcat graphics that now appear on Facebook.
“When I was watching the attack on the Capitol last week with people smashing the windows and going to the Rotunda, it made me reflect that this isn’t an anomaly,” Pollard says. “This is part of America’s DNA.
“You think back about how Jim Crow became the law of the land. Black communities would try to grow and be self-empowered. If white people in the white community next to them didn’t like it, they would go and destroy those communities like in the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. This is not a new thing in America. It’s a sad thing to think about how Dr. King was trying to integrate African Americans. It’s still a challenge in America.”
To ensure that viewers never lose sense of how profound the divisions were in America in the 1960s, Pollard includes recent interviews with former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who marched with King, former FBI director James Comey (who calls the period in the film the darkest in the Bureau’s history) and historians like David J. Garrow, whose book inspired the film. It even includes memories from Clarence B. Jones, who acted as an intermediary between Levison and King. Their comments can be heard throughout the film, but Pollard doesn’t present their faces or even their qualifications as experts on the subject until the end of the film.
“I thought it was really important for the audience to get engaged in the archival material and not have it broken up by talking heads to keep you in the moment of that period: The March on Washington, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the revelations about how the pathology of the FBI and the idea that King was constantly facing many obstacles within the movement, outside the movement and within the FBI,” he says.
Civil rights struggles are hardly new subjects for Pollard’s films. For example, he co-directed the 2017 documentary “ACORN and the Firestorm,” about the Arkansas-founded advocacy group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
“That group was revolutionary in its agenda and in its goals and execution. It was an amazing organization. It was a real honor to be able to spend time with the people involved in ACORN in Little Rock, Chicago and New York. I think it’s a very important film,” Pollard says.
NOT THE LAST
Pollard’s new movie includes content from previously classified documents and audio recordings of when King and Lyndon Johnson were allies and when the two became divided over the Vietnam War. The actual audio recordings the Bureau made of King won’t be available for six more years. Pollard says that he’s comfortable that his film won’t be the last word on the subject of King and Hoover.
“You know and I know there will be some other filmmaker or some other documentarian will come along and find some other asset and uncover some new material and take it in another direction,” he says. “How many films have you seen on so many figures in our history: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X? There’s always stuff to mine in our national folklores and heroes.”
When asked if the tapes might change how we now think of King, Pollard says, “I don’t think so. You know and I know that King was not a polygamous man. Unless those tapes reveal that he was going to shoot somebody ….”