Product Details

• Actors: Martin Luther King Jr: Commemorative
• Format: Black & White, Color, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Mpi Home Video
• VHS Release Date: August 31, 1994
• Run Time: 107 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6300988279
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #11,099 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

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  Video > African American Cinema > African American Heritage > Leaders

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
This absorbing video is chock-full of interviews and footage of Martin Luther King Jr., and a well-rounded picture of the civil-rights movement, beginning with a conversation with Coretta Scott King, Dr. King's wife, describing how her husband's mission has guided how she lives her life today. Throughout the video are more conversations with Coretta and other friends and colleagues of Dr. King including Jesse Jackson, Dick Gregory, Edward Kennedy, Bill Cosby, Andrew Young, Joan Baez, former President Jimmy Carter, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In between the interviews are pockets of historical facts, beginning with how Dr. King developed his views to become, as Dick Gregory describes him, "a giant of a man." It then goes through all the major civil-rights landmarks from the establishment of the Civil Rights Act in 1957 to the guaranteeing of the right for African-Americans to vote in 1964. The raw footage of the 1963 March on Washington is glorious and striking for Dr. King's "Free at Last" speech and the shots of 200,000 people standing beneath the Lincoln Memorial. This documentary does not leave out the violence and atrocities that occurred either. There are objective retellings of the rioting and police brutality that ran rampant throughout the movement. There are also several of Dr. King's most memorable addresses in their entirety such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Civil Disobedience and Nonviolent Struggle, the March on Washington, and his final address in Memphis. Overall The Commemorative Collection is a great teacher about the civil-rights era in history, and is also a wonderful compilation of Dr. King's addresses. --Samantha Allen Storey

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History buffs a must see, August 9, 2000

By	Kiel Johanson (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

Everyone knows who MLK was, but not many know who he really was, and this movie shows the reverends many good deeds, and not just the famous March on Washington and his I Have a Dream speech, but that he visited, in every state, the school with the highest black population and gave moving speeches, and he even gave two in mine, Garfield High School in Seattle WA. After his death, 47 of the 50 schools he visited had riots, including mine, which showed just how large of a following he had.

2.0 out of 5 stars Good history; poor quality - , April 29, 2005

By	Superwoman "AJ" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This video had some great history on it and a lot of footage of MLK in settings where I didn't normally see him. But the quality of a lot of the footage was bad. It wasn't because it was old footage either because I've seen a lot of the same footage on other videos with much better quality. For the price I paid for this ($28.48), the quality was disappointing. It also could have used a lot more dialogue and depth added to the footage that was used. There are other choices of MLK history videos out there which I would suggest people seek out before settling on this one.