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Today marks the 80th birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., and as in years past, most celebrations of his legacy are bound to dwell on his victories bringing change to the Jim Crow south. But Northwestern University’s Block Films takes a different tack tonight by exploring one of King’s most notable defeats. Seth McClellan’s documentary King in Chicago: The Chicago Freedom Movement, screening at 6:30 PM at the Block Museum of Art with the director in attendance, revisits the civil rights leader’s frustrating, ultimately unsuccessful 1966 attempt to eradicate housing discrimination in Chicago, where he was brushed back by white rage and smoothly outflanked by Mayor Richard J. Daley.
McClellan draws on a wealth of interviews with members of the SCLC (Bevel, Jesse Jackson, Dorothy Tillman) and its partner organization here in town, the Chicago Freedom Movement (Billy Hollins, Jerry Herman, Herman Jenkins, Carolyn A. Black). Additional perspective comes from Paul Green of Roosevelt University, Reverend William Briggs of Warren Avenue Church, and the recently notorious Rev. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina Church. Many of them express their anguish when, inevitably, McClellan turns to King’s assassination in Memphis a year and a half after he left Chicago to launch the Poor People’s Campaign. But the documentary also makes an effort to assess King’s unfinished business 40 years after his death. Notes SCLC veteran Al Sampson, “In every major city you go into now, there is this land grab on one side, and ‘What are we gonna do with poor people?’ on the other side.”
