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 of…

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, car…

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 accomplished.

Fo…

“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…

Portraying civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma has been a seven-year journey for British actor David Oyelowo (pronounced "o-yellow-o"). The project famously had been through several directors—Stephen Frears, Paul Haggis, Spike Lee, and Lee Daniels, among them—and after being passed over by everyone…

Director Ava DuVernay’s Martin Luther King, Jr. film Selma will open in limited release on Christmas Day before going wide on January 9, 2015. Paramount and Pathé’s Paul Webb-scripted awards season drama has the powerhouse backing of producers Oprah Winfrey, Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave shingle Plan B, and Cloud…

EXCLUSIVE: After playing Monaco’s Prince Rainer III in the Cannes opening-night film Grace Of Monaco, Tim Roth will play another period figure in a major feature. He’s signing on to the cast of Selma, and he will be playing George Wallace, the Alabama governor who favored segregation and whose bullying tactics…