Perhaps the most affecting memory is that of civil rights leader Xernona Clayton, who recalls taking out her powder compact to disguise the clumsy work of the mortician on King’s face, when his body lay in state at Spelman College. Moving personal observations come from, among others, Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez and SCLC officials including Andrew Young, C.T. This midsection gets slightly bogged down in detail and could benefit from tightening, but the buildup to King’s assassination is expertly handled, as is the shattered aftermath. The filmmakers assemble a dense portrait of a man disheartened by his failure to move the needle on economic justice, even as he succeeded in tracing ties among the common problems facing blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and even low-income whites. Editorials condemning King for crossing the line into government matters caused a backlash, but despite his growing isolation and fatigue after 12 years of nonstop struggle, he continued to put his weight behind the Poor People’s Campaign, which culminated in the 1968 March on Washington. However, when he was pulled against advice into taking a stand on the Vietnam War, he rankled the White House, intensifying the hostile scrutiny and sleaze tactics of FBI director J. That schism in the summer of 1966 was the first real breach in the nonviolence movement associates stress that while King understood the anger and frustration of Carmichael and his supporters, he remained convinced that patience and reasoning were the way to go. After the shooting of James Meredith, who led the March Against Fear, King returned to the South, his immutable core principle of nonviolence proving at odds with the growing Black Power movement spearheaded by Stokely Carmichael. But resistance to giving African-American Southerners the vote inflamed racial unrest in states like Mississippi and Alabama.
Daley, as a different kind of hatred and segregation were exposed in Illinois. He moved the central SCLC think tank to the Chicago slums, causing friction with long-serving mayor Richard J. King shifted the mission beyond undisguised racism to target complicated issues of poverty, housing, unemployment, education and police brutality. That breakthrough legislation was followed directly by the Watts riots in Los Angeles, prompting King to expand the civil rights organization’s influence to segregated Northern cities at a time when many felt the work in the divided South was far from complete. Kunhardt and writer Chris Chuang focus on the increasing fragmentation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. None of it is more chilling than the image of a preteen white boy playing “Dixie” on his clarinet on the sidelines of a 1965 march in Mississippi, flanked by his Confederate flag-waving sister and pausing only to shout “Go home” invective at the peaceful African-American protestors. Superb archival footage is interwoven with the talking heads.
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