Bending Toward Justice: Films for MLK Day
Three films that reflect Martin Luther King Jr.’s faith in the future.
Since 2000, Martin Luther King Jr. Day has been a national holiday in all 50 states, providing Americans a day to celebrate his momentous achievements and inspirational vision for the country. In his celebrated 1968 speech at the National Cathedral, King said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
We're remembering King’s legacy with three films that reflect his hope for justice.
Loving
Mildred and Richard Loving (Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton), the couple at the center of Jeff Nichols’ Loving, offer a potent lesson on the power of love and justice. In 1958, the newly married couple was arrested for breaking Virginia’s law against interracial marriages and forced to move out of the state, raising their children away from their home. It would take nearly 10 years and a case brought by the ACLU to allow the couple to return to their Virginia home. In 1967, the Supreme Court unanimously decided in their favor, banning such laws against interracial marriage everywhere. Vox writes, “In making the political personal, the movie pulls off an even greater feat: infusing an easily politicized story with complexity and quiet passion.” Indeed, the film provides a powerful model for the principles that fuel political change. As the Washington Post writes, “It lives up to its title as a noun and a verb, with elegant, undeniable simplicity.”
BlacKkKlansman
In BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee took the strange but true tale of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), a Black Colorado Springs detective who in the 1970s infiltrated the KKK, and adapted the story to the screen in an urgent and timeless way. “It cannot be just a history lesson,” Lee remarked in The New York Times. “It has to be contemporary.” Weaving together recent events, Civil War fragments, and film history, Lee dramatizes how history both changes and repeats itself. As NPR notes, “If hate groups were insidious four decades ago, argues Lee in his most ferociously entertaining...film in years, how much more dangerous are they today?” The film won the Academy Award® for Best Adapted Screenplay for its imaginative vision.
A Thousand and One
In A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, a young woman, Inez (Teyana Taylor), raises her son in New York City’s Harlem in the late ‘90s and ‘00s. Rockwell told Essence, “What really compelled me to tell this story so urgently was seeing firsthand the impact of gentrification on the Black communities of New York City.” Set against nearly two decades of changing NYC politics, Inez’s story highlights the changing complexity of just getting by for so many Black mothers. But Inez’ journey is a tale of injustice and possibility. “This is a tough, beautiful, honest, and bracingly hopeful movie,” writes the Washington Post. “A Thousand and One isn’t just worth seeing—it’s worth celebrating.”