MLK/FBI with Sam Pollard and Benjamin Hedin

This episode was made possible with the gracious collaboration of Newport Film and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities’ “Culture is Key” Project.

In the 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation spied on civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sam Pollard and Benjamin Hedin tell that story in a powerful documentary that shines a light on race, power, and the politics of personal destruction.

Sam Pollard’s career as a feature film and television video editor and documentary producer and director spans almost thirty years. He recently served as Executive Producer on the documentary “Brother Outsider,” the Official Selection for the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton’s Blackside production “Eyes On The Prize II: America at the Racial Crosswords.” One of his episodes in this series received an Emmy. He returned to Blackside as Co-Executive Producer/Producer of Hampton’s last documentary series, “I’ll Make Me A World: Stories of African-American Artists and Community.”

Benjamin Hedin has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Nation, The Oxford American, The Chicago Tribune, Poets and Writers, Salmagundi, The Georgia Review, and other publications. He is the editor of “Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader” and author of the nonfiction chronicle, “In Search of the Movement: The Struggle for Civil Rights Then and Now.” Triquarterly Books will publish his first novel, “Under the Spell” in the spring of 2021. He also produced and wrote of the Grammy-nominated documentary “Two Trains Runnin’.”

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