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Martin Luther King Jr. Day
TCM, Beginning at 5 a.m.
Turner Classic Movies remembers Martin Luther King Jr. and the legacy of what he stood for all day today. The morning and afternoon lineup features dramatic films whose stories addressed elements of race in America, including The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), a sci-fi film starring Harry Belafonte, in which racism even persists among three survivors of an apocalypse; Intruder in the Dust, a 1949 crime drama in which a Black man (Juano Hernandez) is unjustly accused of murdering a white man; One Potato, Two Potato, a 1964 drama centered around a romance between a white woman (Barbara Barrie) and a Black man (Bernie Hamilton); The Defiant Ones (1958), which saw costars Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis both earn Best Actor Oscar nominations as escaped prisoners, one Black and one white, who are shackled together and must cooperate to survive; Gordon Parks: Moments Without Proper Names (1987), a self-portrait of Parks’ life directed by the filmmaker/ photographer himself, with his poetry and pictures providing a narrative thread accompanied by a musical score Parks also composed; The Learning Tree (pictured) (1969), a coming-of-age drama written and directed by Parks that was the first film directed by an African American for a major American film studio; Sounder (1972), a drama that follows a Black sharecropper family in the Deep South during the Great Depression and stars Oscar nominees Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson; and Nothing but a Man (1964), a drama about a Black railroad worker trying to maintain his respect in a small, racist Alabama town in the early 1960s. Today’s primetime lineup features a number of political/social educational films and documentaries related to the civil rights movement, particularly in the Chicago area, that were made by former production company The Film Group in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Many of these titles are making their TCM debuts, including The Film Group’s feature-length documentaries American Revolution II (1969) and The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), as well as a number of their short educational films, including Cicero March (1966), Black Moderates and Black Militants (1968) and more.