The 3 Best Documentaries to Watch This Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Vogue
Documentaries provide an easy and important way to celebrate the life of a civil rights icon.

January 21 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the U.S., and while the idea of spending your day off inside and in front of a screen may not directly appeal to you, we’re recommending that you siphon off at least some of your allotted free time today to take in a documentary film. And not just any documentary film, but one that gives the appropriate context for the day in question—whether it’s Sidney Lumet’s Academy Award–nominated offering, released two years after King’s death, or Peter Kunhardt’s more recent entry into the genre, which zeroes in on the last three years in the life of the civil rights icon. Watch one—or all three—get inspired, and get out there and change the world. As Dr. King famously said, “The time is always right to do what is right.” Below, three we recommend:

King: A Filmed Record . . . From Montgomery to Memphis, 1970

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1970, Sidney Lumet and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s documentary was released two years after King’s death, and chronicles critical moments in the life of the civil rights icon beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. Actor and fellow activist Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Joanne Woodward, and James Earl Jones all appear. Available on Starz.

King in the Wilderness, 2018

“Any project about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. eventually finds tension in the space between the urgent specificity of his vision (arguably more urgent now than ever) and in the martyr-like symbolism he’s acquired since his death; tension, essentially, between King the human, and King the divine,” Vogue’s Julia Felsenthal wrote in her review of this film in 2018. Director Peter Kunhardt’s HBO documentary combines archival footage of King and present-day interviews with more than a dozen of the civil rights leader’s intimates, and closely follows the last three years of his life—navigating hecklers, cynics, and detractors—fighting for the gospel of nonviolence amid bloody uprisings in cities across America and against the rising tide of black power, as espoused by younger leaders like Stokely Carmichael. On HBO.

In Remembrance of Martin, 1986

PBS’s in-depth look at the civil rights icon includes King’s friends and family as commentators, including Coretta Scott King, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Julian Bond, and Rev. Jesse Jackson. On Kanopy.

See the videos.