The 4 Best Documentaries to Watch This Martin Luther King Jr. Day
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Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the U.S., and while the idea of spending your day off inside and in front of a screen may not entirely appeal to you, we’re recommending that you spend at least some of your free time with a documentary film. Not just any documentary film, but one that provides the appropriate context for the day in question—whether it’s Sidney Lumet’s Academy Award–nominated offering, released two years after King’s death, or Peter Kunhardt’s more recent entry into the genre, zeroing in on the last three years of the civil rights icon’s life. Watch one—or all five—get inspired, and go out and change the world. As Dr. King famously said, “The time is always right to do what is right.” Below, are four films we recommend:
King: A Filmed Record . . . From Montgomery to Memphis, 1970
Nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1970, Sidney Lumet and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s documentary chronicles several critical moments in King’s life, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. Actor and fellow activist Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Joanne Woodward, and James Earl Jones all appear.
How to Watch: Stream on Starz, iTunes, or YouTube.
King in the Wilderness, 2018
“Any project about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. eventually finds tension in the space between the urgent specificity of his vision (arguably more urgent now than ever) and in the martyr-like symbolism he’s acquired since his death; tension, essentially, between King the human, and King the divine,” Vogue’s Julia Felsenthal wrote in her review of this film in 2018. The focus of director Peter Kunhardt’s HBO documentary—which includes archival footage of King and present-day interviews with more than a dozen of his intimates—is the last three years of King’s life, as he navigated hecklers, cynics, and detractors; fought for the gospel of nonviolence amid bloody uprisings in cities across America; and resisted the rising tide of the Black Power movement.
How to Watch: Stream on HBO Max, Amazon, iTunes, or YouTube.
In Remembrance of Martin, 1986
Created by Henry Hampton and narrated by political activist Julian Bond, this documentary series about the “glory years” of the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1965 covers everything from the murder of Emmett Till to the Little Rock school riots to the Montgomery, Alabama, transit boycott. Perspectives from Coretta Scott King, Kwame Ture, Alabama governor George Wallace, and other figures who have passed since filming make this view of that era all the more valuable.
How to Watch: Stream on HBO Max.
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