An unsettling short film titled "MLK/FBI" landed on several streaming platforms on January 15, the day celebrated as the Martin Luther King Jr. Day (MLK Day) in the United States.

The documentary, by Emmy award-winning Sam Pollard, narrates a shameful chapter of American espionage from the 1960s, the decade that witnessed the awakening of the Black community against segregation and suppression.

Based on the recently declassified files of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), it exposes a snooping campaign against the Black American non-violent civil rights crusader aimed at concocting personal scandals and undermining the movement.

It all started with the 1963 March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom, where he delivered his iconic "I have a dream" speech in front a 250,000-strong crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, according to the 104-minute movie.

Two days after the protest, the then FBI domestic intelligence chief William Sullivan advised in an internal memo: "We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security."

Fearing the rise of a "Black messiah," the then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover gave his blessings to a sophisticated 24/7 surveillance operation to dig dirt on King. 

His sex life was closely monitored – phones tapped and hotel rooms rigged with spy cameras. 

The tapes failed to establish a national security threat but resulted in evidence of relationships with his various girlfriends. 

The film reveals that Sullivan sent a package of King's sex tapes to his residence with a letter presenting suicide as the only available option to spare him potential public embarrassment. The parcel was received by his wife. 

The now-uncensored 1964 letter reads: "There's only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is."

The unflappable King didn't budge and went on to intensify the fight for equal rights for all. But the FBI's unscrupulous mission only ended with his assassination in 1968. 

The tapes are under seal by the National Archives until 2027.

"I knew they were spying, but I didn't know the extent of it," said Pollard in a TV interview, adding that his film unveils how American authorities came together to destroy King.

In the documentary, James Comey, who served as FBI director under Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017, described it as the "darkest period of the bureau's history."