Throughout Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s history-altering political career, he was treated by U.S. intelligence agencies like an enemy of the state. Newly declassified files detail the FBI surveillance that dogged King’s activism, fueled by the racist and red-baiting paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover.

When revelatory intel is obtained through a malicious abuse of power, how much should we know about the figures behind great strides in the fight for equality? No mere history lesson, Samuel D. Pollard’s engrossing documentary cleverly and meticulously interrogates its own existence.