Latest in Martin Luther King Jr.

Morgan Freeman will commemorate Martin Luther King Jr Day tomorrow with a series of 12 videos that will begin playing hourly on Freeman's Instagram page, at 8 AM Eastern time. Each video recalls Dr. King's words, most of which have much to say about life in current  difficult times as they did when he said them back…

IFC Films said Tuesday that it acquired North American rights to MLK/FBI, the Sam Pollard-directed documentary that premiered today at the Toronto Film Festival and will play at the New York Film Festival too. IFC Films will release the film on January 15, 2021, ahead of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday and the…

Last night I was sitting in my living room and a convoy of trucks drove by my home filled with law enforcement and National Guard troops. I am a 59-year old African-American man and this brought back vivid childhood memories. On April 4, 1968, 18 days before my 7th birthday, I was in the middle of the street in my…

Half a century ago today, Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead in Memphis while supporting striking black sanitation workers in that southern city. For a nation still severed today along stark racial and economic lines, the death at age 39 of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning preacher and civil rights icon on the evening…

EXCLUSIVE: Oscar-winning Precious scribe Geoffrey Fletcher has been set to write I Am a Man, a feature film adaptation in the works from Sycamore Pictures based on Michael K. Honey’s 2007 book about the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike that became a turning point in the U.S. civil rights movement. The strike…

EXCLUSIVE: Black Label Media has stepped up to produce and finance Hellhound On His Trail. Scott Cooper will direct his scripted adaptation of the Hampton Sides non fiction bestseller about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr by James Earl Ray. Set against the larger backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, the…

Jeffrey Lord, CNN’s Donald Trump surrogate-cum-Pecks Bad Boy, struck again this morning, calling the former The Apprentice star-turned-POTUS “the Martin Luther King of health care.” As always, Lord’s incendiary remarks got quite a rise from other talking heads on scene. Lord trended on Twitter. Mission…

“They’re very hostile. These are very hostile people. These are very angry people,” President Donald Trump told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity of the media. Interviewing Trump tonight, Hannity said, “The New York Times, CNN, NBC, they’ve used the word ‘liar’ to describe you, as it relates, if you’re talking about…

EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Mackie has been set for the coveted role of Martin Luther King Jr., starring opposite Bryan Cranston in All The Way, the adaptation of the Tony-winning Robert Schenkkan play that Jay Roach will direct for HBO. Production begins in September. This one is being exec produced by Steven Spielberg. It…

Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon B. Johnson are in the news for very different reasons. A movie set in the South, dealing with race relations, wins a best picture Oscar nomination even though the black star of the film does not. Its director ultimately is overlooked. The Oscars are shrouded in controversy…

Saturday Night Live returned from vacation with second-time host Kevin Hart and plenty of current events to masticate upon, especially given the episode’s timing between last week’s Oscar nominations and Monday’s celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. In the cold open, Kenan Thompson’s MLK visits Pete Davids…

UPDATE, WEDNESDAY, 7 AM: Gay Talese speaks out in the New York Times. In a Letter To The Editor published this morning in the New York Times, former Times reporter Gay Talese, who covered Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery for the Paper of Record, expanded on his remarks yesterday during a…