If you’re looking to enjoy a documentary this weekend in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, you’re in for a treat. Christopher Everett, SDF Artistic Director, has curated a list of SDF documentaries that resonate with the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. These films champion the ideals of equality, social justice, and freedom.
THE LOVING STORY (2011)
Director: Nancy Buirski
Logline: This documentary film tells the dramatic story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple living in Virginia in the 1950s, and their landmark Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that changed history.
Watch: Streaming on Tubi
DAISY BATES: FIRST LADY OF LITTLE ROCK (2012)
Director: Sharon LaCruise
Logline: A look at the life of African American political activist and newspaper publisher Daisy Bates.
Watch: Streaming on PBS
SPIES OF MISSISSIPPI (2014)
Director: Dawn Porter
Logline: Enter the chilling world of anti-civil rights espionage. Spies of Mississippi reveals in shocking detail the state of Mississippi’s effort to undermine the civil rights movement using a vast network of spies. Their identities will shock you. Whites and Blacks spied for Old Dixie. And the Sovereignty Commission would stop at nothing, even murder, to retain the “Mississippi way of life”.
Watch: Streaming on Prime Video
ALTHEA (2014)
Director: Rex Miller
Logline: A documentary focused on the trailblazing athlete Althea Gibson, the first African-American to play and win at Wimbledon and Forest Hills.
Watch: Streaming on Tubi
CHAIRMAN JONES: AN IMPROBABLE LEADER (2016)
Director: Anna Jones
Logline: Chairman Jones tells the story of the director’s father, James H. Jones, a farmer who emerges as a trailblazer during the 1969 school desegregation crisis sparked when Northampton County refuses to implement Brown v Board of Education. After freeing himself from sharecropping in the 1950s, Jones launched a personal campaign to free black children from Jim Crow education.
Watch: Streaming on PBS
LILLIAN SMITH: BREAKING THE SILENCE (2019)
Director: Hal Jacobs
Logline: One of the forgotten heroes behind the Civil Rights Movement, a courageous writer recognized by Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin and others, she was a voice of reason to white and black southerners afraid to speak out. Here was a white, gay, Southern woman who remained in the South and wasn’t afraid to break the silence against the demagogues.
Watch: Streaming on Vimeo
THE NEUTRAL GROUND (2021)
Director: CJ Hunt
Logline: The Neutral Ground documents the City of New Orleans’ fight over monuments and America’s troubled romance with the Lost Cause. In 2015, director CJ Hunt was filming the New Orleans City Council’s vote to remove four confederate monuments. But when that removal is halted by death threats, CJ sets out to understand why a losing army from 1865 still holds so much power in America.
Watch: Streaming on Prime Video
REFUGE (2023)
Directors: Erin Bernhardt, Din Blankenship
Logline: In Clarkston, a small town in Georgia, a successful Kurdish doctor and a Muslim-hating white supremacist form an unlikely friendship. Against the backdrop of an exceptionally racially- diverse community, themes of xenophobia, Islamophobia, and forgiveness play out in an intimate and accessible way.
Watch: Streaming on Prime Video
