January 20 | 14 Films
African American poet and performer Gil Scott-Heron famously chanted, “The revolution will not be televised.” Dr. Martin Luther King – racial justice activist, Baptist minister and one of the most prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement – disagreed. As journalists Robert Donovan and Ray Scherer point out, “The civil-rights revolution in the South began when a man and the eye of the television film camera came together, giving the camera a focal point for events breaking from state to state, and the man, Martin Luther King Jr., high exposure on television sets from coast to coast.” Indeed, the African American struggle for equality relied heavily on visual culture to disseminate its fight against racial segregation to audiences around the world. The movement would not have gained traction without the video camera. Alexis C. Madrigal for “The Atlantic” has gone so far as to describe Dr. King as a “television producer.”
Depictions of Dr. King on the Hollywood screen not only elegiacally preserve his memory, but also meta-cinematically capture the leader’s reliance on the moving image to further the cause of civil rights. Though the biopic, as a genre, tends to reduce the complexities of celebrity life to the run time of a feature film, Dr. King has ‘lived through’ many films that do not explicitly refer to him, but nevertheless capture his dedication to racial equality.
This Martin Luther King (MLK) Day, January 20, 2025, TCM honors Dr. King’s offscreen and onscreen legacy with a series of films that depict both the horrors of racism and the hope for racial justice. Jacqueline Stewart hosts the all-day showcase and is joined by Dr. King’s youngest child, Bernice King, during primetime.
The program kicks off with A Patch of Blue (1965) starring Sidney Poitier. Produced during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the film tells the story of a young blind woman (Elizabeth Hartman) who meets a man at a park (Poitier). The two form a deep bond that is complicated by the racism that exists around them, particularly from the young woman’s racist mother (Shelley Winters). The film was a critical and box-office success, earning five Oscar nominations and one win for Best Supporting Actress for Shelley Winters. Despite not receiving a nomination for the role, Poitier had previously made Oscar history when he became the first Black actor to win a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Lilies of the Field (1963).
The Learning Tree (1969), Gordon Parks’ adaptation of his semi-autobiographical novel, follows in our lineup. The film, set in Cherokee Flats, Kansas, follows a young Black teenager, Newt Winger (Kyle Johnson), as he comes of age after witnessing a dual murder: his friend Marcus (Alex Clarke) kills a white man in self-defense after stealing some apples and a racist white sheriff kills an innocent Black boy with no just cause. Though Newt, who has incredible intellectual potential, tries to move on with his life, the racially motivated murders of his past haunt him into adulthood. The Learning Tree was the first film directed by a Black filmmaker for a major American film studio, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts.
TCM also screens Sounder (1972), the adaptation of William H. Armstrong’s 1969 novel, directed by Martin Ritt. The film follows the Morgans, an African American sharecropping family in Depression-era Louisiana who raise sugar for their white landlord. Food is often scarce for the Morgans even though David (Kevin Hooks) regularly goes hunting for game with his father, Nathan (Paul Winfield), and their dog, Sounder. As David and Nathan bring back less and less on their hunting excursions, the family grows hungrier and Nathan resorts to stealing a ham from a nearby schoolhouse. He is swiftly arrested by the police. Loyal Sounder runs after the deputy wagon and is shot, injured and runs away. David never gives up hope that Sounder will return, just as he believes he will see his father again.
Sardonically titled after the family dog, Sounder is clearly more about the unbearable pains of racial segregation on Black Americans – hunger, exhaustion, educational inequity, lack of property rights, disenfranchisement and unjust imprisonment, all exacerbated by the Great Depression – rather than the poor treatment of animals.
Sounder was nominated for four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Screenplay - Based on Material from Another Medium (Lonne Elder III), Best Actor (Paul Winfield) and Best Actress (Cicely Tyson). Pauline Kael writes that Cicely Tyson, as the steadfast and poignant Morgan matriarch, Rebecca, “has the singular good fortune to play the first great black heroine on the screen [...] She is visually extraordinary – every movement true to the archetype in our heads – and her voice is so precisely controlled that her soft words can pierce one’s defenses.”
Indeed, Tyson is associated with an era of Black American cinema that concertedly broke away from the two-dimensional “super Black” depictions of African Americans in popular Blaxploitation films. Following Tyson’s lead, TCM takes MLK Day as an opportunity to celebrate Black women who have been brave enough to represent the realities of racial struggles – and resist. To that end, it screens The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), a television film broadcast by CBS, also starring Tyson as the titular heroine whose life spanned both slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. The film won nine Emmys including Best Lead Actress in a Drama (Tyson) and Actress of the Year (Tyson).
The program’s primetime showings begin with William Greaves’ Nationtime (1972), a documentary covering the landmark National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana in 1972, which gathered 10,000 Black artists and leaders across the political spectrum. Though the film spotlights male activists like Amiri Baraka, Jesse Jackson and Harry Belafonte, it celebrates both Dr. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, and Malcolm X’s wife, Betty Shabazz, as well as Audley “Queen Mother” Moore – all Black women who were integral to the successes of the movement.
I Am Somebody (1970), which also includes footage of Coretta Scott King, is also on the program. It documents how Black female hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina went on strike for union recognition and a wage increase and found themselves in confrontation with The National Guard. I Am Somebody is directed by Madeline Anderson (known for her pioneering 1960 film Integration Report I, the first documentary to be directed by an African American woman).
Late-night programming on MLK Day begins with In the Heat of the Night (1967), widely considered one of the greatest American movies ever made, and one of director Norman Jewison’s three “race dramas,” along with A Soldier’s Story (1984) and The Hurricane (1999), both starring Denzel Washington. In the Heat of the Night follows Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) a Black detective from Philadelphia who is arrested in Sparta, Mississippi on suspicion of murder. After proving his innocence, he goes on to track down the real killer. His investigation reveals every social and racial level of the small town.
In the Heat of the Night was the first major Hollywood film shot in color to consider the complexion of Black actors. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler recognized that standard lighting created too much glare on darker skin tones, making it difficult to see facial expressions. As a result, he used lower lighting on Poitier, changing the standard for how cinema considered lighting darker skin tones. Jewison’s film was nominated for seven Oscars, winning five, including Best Picture. Quincy Jones’ score, featuring a title song sung by Ray Charles, received a Grammy nomination. The success of In the Heat of the Night resulted in two sequels with Poitier as well as a television series of the same name.
TCM’s MLK Day program rounds off with Malcolm X (1972), the last documentary by Arnold Perl, produced by Marvin Worth who had long wanted to make a movie about the Black Power leader. He commissioned James Baldwin to write the script with Perl, who tragically died in 1971. The film became a documentary, completed with the help of Perl’s wife, Nancy Ann Reals. Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, served as a consultant. It was nominated for the Best Documentary (Feature) Academy Award in 1973. Perl’s script came full circle two decades later when it was re-written by Spike Lee for his 1992 feature film, Malcolm X, with Worth again at the production helm.
Though many films on TCM’s MLK Day program do not feature MLK himself, his revolutionary humanitarian spirit pervades each of them. Several of the films on the program feature everyday inspirational African Americans striving for a better country, reminding us that Dr. King was both ordinary and extraordinary. His life should not be thought of on its own, but one in community with others also making a difference. His work is an example, a universal invitation to his audience to believe in change. As David Oyelowo, the Black British actor who played Dr. King in Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014) puts it: “Dr. King […] spent 13 years of his life, virtually every day, campaigning for and fighting for people who had been marginalized and subjected to racism. He was a voice to the voiceless, and he did that tirelessly, and his faith was the engine to that. But he was just a human being, at the end of the day. I still believe we go to the movies to see ourselves, and if we can see ourselves in Dr. King, I think that is really potent and powerful.”
Other films in the day’s lineup include Lost Boundaries (1949), Intruder in the Dust (1949), A Raisin in the Sun (1961), Crisis (1963), Freedom on My Mind (1994) and the TCM premiere of Boycott (2001).
