Film: Gittell on MLK/FBI

in front of the mirror before school to remind us how amazing we are, to believe in myself, my strengths, my talents.”

Starting in third grade, LaTeal played saxophone and tenor sax before transitioning to piano. She attended a jazz band camp in College Park and sang in a gospel choir at Frostburg State University before transferring to Southern Maryland Community College. She eventually graduated from Howard University with a degree in radio, TV, and film. An internship for WHUR (96.3 FM) solidified her production skills, and later, her connections with the station paid off with airplay for her 2014 single “Infatuation,” recorded with a group she called Aflocentric. After that, she taught hip-hop and beatmaking at the Latin American Youth Center in Columbia Heights. Now she juggles multiple projects and lives in Alexandria with her fiancée Tashira Halyard, a child welfare attorney who blogs about style, self-care, and social justice.

In 2018, as the protests for Black lives amped up in cities across the country, LaTeal recorded The Black Joy Experience, a compelling collection of well-known freedom songs and liberation chants she produced with BYP100, a national nonprofit activist group. Her first politically driven project, it featured more than 20 activists from around the U.S. “When it was released in 2018, I was a little disappointed and thought we should have gotten more traction,” she says. “It turned out that the time for that album to impact the world was during the summer of the George Floyd uprisings when we started to see tens of thousands of album streams and see and hear our chants being recited via social media at demonstrations all over the nation. ”

LaTeal also co-founded the Black Girls Handgames Project in 2018, using hip-hop beats to revitalize childhood clapping games. “Basically, we merge the cultural traditions of hand games and hip-hop to facilitate community-driven experiences,” she says. LaTeal considers the program particularly important for Black girls. “Oftentimes, Black girls are victims of adultification bias, which removes their innocence and ability to be seen as children,” she says. “The project is about helping our girls to experience play in a way that they deserve.” A secondary benefit of teaching teenage girls beatmaking skills is the possibility of improving women’s representation in the music production field.

At Black Girls Handgames Project events, participants are taught Miss Mary Mack, Apple on a Stick, Gigolo, and other games. “It’s so cool because you see the 8-year-olds stepping up and leading the adults, and vice versa,” says LaTeal. “I make it contemporary by putting a hip-hop instrumental trap beat on it. So it’s Miss Mary Mack with beatboxing, and it’s super interactive but has some Black historical significance as well.”

In 2019, LaTeal brought the Black Girls Handgames Project to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival for one glorious afternoon, as crowds delighted in Miss Mary Mack, Slide, and Little Sally Walker. “It was such a diverse audience,” says LaTeal. “It was really a magical experience, all based on the childhood experiences of Black girls, which I think is really dope.”

With the advent of COVID-19, LaTeal pivoted to focus on FFC, obtaining a grant from Open Society Foundations, which funds independent groups working for democratic governance and social justice. Once she assembled the collective, it took the group three months to complete We Keep Us Safe.The collective’s efforts incorporate her own work documenting some of the artistic aspects of the local movement for Black lives. “After George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, I started to support D.C. activist organizations by remixing sounds from the movement into contemporary songs. I wanted to add video to capture the organizing work that is happening in D.C., so I started going out and capturing content,” LaTeal says. “We’re addressing some really painful toxicity, and yet there’s so much joy in this project.”

Makia Green, lead organizer with Black Lives Matter DC and an organizer with the Working Families Party, considers LaTeal an essential part of the movement. “OnRaé is such a light. She captures the essence of protest culture and helps us tell the story of the uprising for Black liberation and defunding the police,” says Green. “OnRaé is in the Black Lives Matter community, and her work uplifts Black resistance, Black healing, and Black joy.

“She’s providing opportunities to the artist community in the middle of the pandemic,” adds Green. “The fact that she built a whole collective in the middle of a pandemic and mass unemployment is an investment in the artist community.”

LaTeal recorded part of the track “Our Lives Matter,” credited to LaTeal featuring Afriye and Marley, last summer at a children’s protest along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in Southeast. As 5-year-old Afriye led the singsong chant—“we are Black, we are strong, our lives matter”—LaTeal walked in front of her, recording. “She was so passionate about it, and I had my phone directly in front of her mouth as she was marching down the street,” says LaTeal, who later mixed the chant for that track with snippets of an interview she conducted with Marley, a 9-year-old protester.

“When I think of freedom, I think of a world where my students aren’t afraid to walk in the rain with a hoodie on, because [now] they think about Trayvon Martin walking in a hoodie and being murdered because he was racially profiled,” says LaTeal. “I think of a world where Black youth have access to the equitable education, resources, and technology they need to be successful. When I think of reimagining public safety—I think of a world that does not have police terror, state sanctioned-violence, state-sanctioned murder.”

For now, she will continue to prioritize art and activism. “I see the amazing impact of art and how beneficial it can be for our youth every day,” she says. “Music is universal, and I believe it has the power to bring people together in a way that other mediums can’t. And I do believe that art has the power to change the world.”

Content of Their Characters

MLK/FBI

Directed by Sam Pollard

Those with even a cursory knowledge of American history already know most of the story: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to 1972, viewed Martin Luther King Jr. as a threat to law and order, or maybe just his own stranglehold on the American justice system. The bureau kept a detailed file on the civil rights leader, filled with salacious details gleaned from surveillance of his private life. Then they used it: They sent a recording of him and his alleged mistress to King’s wife, followed by a letter to King himself, encouraging him to commit suicide to prevent these personal secrets from ever reaching the public. Understandably, there are those who think the FBI had something to do with his assassination.

MLK/FBI, a documentary by Sam Pollard, offers no revelatory additions to this story, but fills in some meaningful shading that makes the picture come to life. Blending archival footage of King and Hoover with interviews with scholars, historians, and a few figures who were in King’s orbit at the time, the film tracks the FBI’s public and private campaigns against the man Hoover famously called “the most dangerous Negro of the future.” Pollard, who is best known for editing many of Spike Lee’s films in the 1990s, avoids talking heads and keeps the faces of King and Hoover front and center, as his experts elucidate their points in voice-over.

It’s a nice change of pace from historical documentaries that are overly reliant on expert interviews, but the technique also serves a purpose. Simply looking at these two figures for so long helps to reorient the viewer to the time when these events occurred, which allows the film’s thesis to fully bloom: MLK/FBI seeks to remind us that King was something close to a pariah in his time, not the universally respected figure he is today, and that the FBI was not a rogue agency acting against the wishes of the American people. “A lot of people understood what the FBI was up to,” says one expert, “and in fact, they supported it.” It gives the battle between King and Hoover the stakes that history books rarely do.

MLK/FBI builds in the viewer the feeling that if a figure like Martin Luther King Jr. were to show up in 2020 (or if, say, another Black liberation movement formed in the wake of repeated shootings of unarmed Black citizens by the state), they would still be considered a threat by the media establishment, the government, and half the population. Consider the film’s man-on-the-street interviews, in which one man says King is the worst person in America, and another, who, encouraged by the specifics of the FBI’s public campaign against King, proudly asserts that King was “without a doubt” trained by Communists. She even has a newspaper article to back up her wildly false claim. It all sounds so tragically familiar.

That’s a justification for MLK/FBI to exist, and also a point against it. Familiarity is not necessarily the stuff of great cinema, and there are times when it feels as if Pollard is simply running through facts that should already be known to any literate American. Then again, illuminating what interviewee and former FBI director James Comey describes as “the darkest part of the bureau’s history” is probably worth doing, especially at a time when agreeing on a common story is one of our nation’s biggest challenges. Strong with purpose, MLK/FBI demythologizes the past and sets the record straight on our present. —Noah Gittell MLK/FBI is available to stream on demand beginning Jan. 15.