My eight favorite Martin Luther King Day movies

We just managed to survive a month largely dedicated to one specific holiday. Every year Hollywood cranks out still more Christmas-themed movies, further adding to the hype and hysteria. Nobody in their right mind wants to see Martin Luther King Day receive similar treatment.

For starters, by now we’re all sick of holiday craziness. One of the beauties of MLK Day is that it automatically comes with built-in dignity, a welcome antidote to the month of December. Further, many suggest that we treat King’s celebration as a “day on” rather than a day off. The idea is to get out into the community and do something good for someone rather than sitting around the house watching holiday-themed movies.

However, there are at least a handful of films out there that celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dedication to social justice, racial equality and nonviolence. Enough at least to allow you to devote some TV time to something more than mindless entertainment.

In a way this list wrote itself after I set one simple standard: each movie had to be primarily about somebody who wasn’t white. It’s amazing how frequently movies about civil rights struggles turn out to be about a white person’s experience of the problem. Cry Freedom and Mississippi Burning come immediately to mind. Fortunately, I was able to come up with eight exceptions (even if half the pictures on the list were directed by Spike Lee).


Gandhi – Both Dr. King and this movie were inspired by Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution in India. Ben Kingsley does a great job in the title role, helping audiences truly appreciate the man and his importance not only in his homeland but in the world as a whole.

Malcolm X – Dr. King and Malcolm X are often inaccurately treated as the carrot and the stick of the civil rights movement. And of course as the stick part of the equation Malcolm X often gets cast as a white-people-hating demon. This movie does an outstanding job of considering its subject as a multi-dimensional person rather than a cardboard boogeyman. What a shame nobody (to my knowledge) ever made a movie this good about Dr. King.

Catch a Fire – For the next three entries we cross the Atlantic to Africa, where many places have racial problems that make America’s still pretty bad situation look like a birthday present. This movie about an anti-Apartheid rebel does an excellent job of examining not only institutionalized racism but also the root causes of violence and the true value of pacifism.

Hotel Rwanda – And then sometimes the violence gets completely out of control. How can anyone keep a peaceful spirit in the middle of a world given over to mass slaughter? This tale of a hotel manager trying to rescue people from genocide demonstrates the value of nonviolence even in the most extreme conditions.

Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony – This documentary about protest music in South Africa is an excellent portrait of a brutally oppressed people finding subtle ways to fight back. Though I don’t think Dr. King would have thought much about the violent content of some of the lyrics, at least singing about violence is a step removed from actually committing it.

When the Levees Broke – Back home now. In the United States we have a genuinely astounding ability to pretend that problems aren’t actually happening. This epic documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina reminds us that no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that we’ve erased race and class lines (or at least rendered them irrelevant), they’re still very real and have very real consequences.

Bamboozled – The mainstream media really don’t take criticism well, not even when they richly deserve it. Thus it came as no surprise when this movie got buried in initial release (I’d never even heard of it until I happened to notice the disc in the video store). The production paints with a broad brush, satirizing racial ignorance by suggesting that a TV show designed to be as racist as possible could turn out to be a smash hit. Oh to live in a world where such a thing seemed less possible.

Do the Right Thing – And finally, here’s the “if you see only one” moment. More than two decades have passed since this movie’s theatrical release, and in that time the film industry (even Lee himself) has seldom if ever had anything this honest to say about the uncomfortable subject of race.