This post was originally published on Atlanta Voice
By Laura Nwogu
Sports bring people together, and it wasn’t any different for civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Short documentary film, “Hoops, Hopes, and Dreams” tells the untold story about how King and a team of civil rights activists used basketball as a tool to create change, foster community, and fuel movements for years to come.
The Atlanta Voice sat down with executive producer Dr. Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s youngest child and CEO of the King Center, to talk about her father’s legacy and how this film peels back the layers on an iconic figure we all know.
“Hoops, Hopes, and Dreams” will premiere on Hulu on Jan. 19, 2026, under the Andscape Films banner.
The Atlanta Voice: The documentary explores the connection between activism, politics, and sports, specifically basketball, and the importance of meeting people where they’re at. When you think about what your father accomplished and what, later on, former President Obama accomplished, what was it about their strategies that you think resonated with so many people? Why do you think that link between sports, activism, and politics works?
Dr. Bernice King: “It’s kind of a rhetorical question, to a certain extent, because I think what the strategy was is that they connected to people where they were — that they went to the people. Obama essentially won because he connected with the grassroots in a way that very few people do in elected politics. A lot of people tend to go to the familiar. He reached far and wide, and he even did that with his donations. He raised the most money just by getting people to give $1, which was very powerful. So, I think that’s the same link for my father.
“First of all, he was with the people. He didn’t lead the movement from an ivory tower or from a pulpit, although he used the pulpit. But he was out there amongst the people in so many different ways, and he met them wherever they were, and sometimes even on their terms. When you think about the conversation he was having with Stokely Carmichael when they were marching together, Stokely Carmichael wanted to use the word Black power, and daddy said, ‘I get it. We need power as a people.’ He said, ‘But what you don’t want to do is to cause confusion, because there’s semantics involved.’ Words have denotative meaning, and they have connotative meaning. And right now, there are so many connotations associated with power that can be taken out of context. And what we’re doing, will become the conversation instead of what we’re trying to accomplish. So, he was meeting him where he was. Not trying to say, ‘No, Stokely, you need to follow my way.’
“And I think the connection between the three is in the word that you used. To be effective in activism, to be effective in politics, to be effective in sports, strategy wins the day, all day. And I think in today’s society, one of the places where we still need a little bit of growth in activism is in the area of strategy and planning, and executing it. Not just collaborating, not just having teamwork, but taking that strategy and determining what to execute at what point in time.”
AV: And when people hear the name Martin Luther King Jr., they often just think of his role as this iconic civil rights activist. What new perspective about your father’s legacy do you want people to take away after watching the documentary?
BK: “Obviously, my father introduced this nation, in a social justice way, to nonviolence. Gandhi in India is where he got his tactics from. He said he got his inspiration from Jesus Christ. When many people think about nonviolence, and they look at all the demonstrations, they forget that it was a group of people. It was a team. Many people will say, ‘Well, I’m not gonna let anybody hit me upside the head.’ They individualize it, not realizing that the effectiveness of the movement is that there was a group. There was a team. There was agreement amongst those that we’re going to posture ourselves this way because we are trying to expose the evil and the injustice. We don’t want to be a contributor to it, and again, confuse the issue. I want to remind people of that teamwork.
“But the second thing is not a new perspective; it’s just something people forget. My father was 26 years old when the movement started. He was young. Many of those who were around him were young. The power and strength of it was a movement of young people; that’s where the strength of that movement came from. So, I would say, not necessarily a new perspective, but a reminder that young people fueled the movement for social change in the ’50s and ’60s.”
AV: How do you hope this film contributes to the conversation surrounding your father’s fight for civil and equal rights?
BK: “First of all, I don’t want people to lose hope. The film, I think, introduces a new perspective: meeting people where they are. It also exposes the fact that ordinary people changed the world. There’s nothing supernatural or superhuman about my father. He was a normal person. He grew up very normal, faced very horrific situations growing up as a child, and being exposed to segregation, seeing sites of lynching, and being rejected because of the color of his skin. When he was with his father, they went into a store to buy some shoes, and they told his father that they would serve him if he went to the back of the store. He said, ‘No, I want to be served right here.’ And even though they wouldn’t comply, he walked out of this store and said, ‘I don’t care how long I have to live with this. I don’t accept it.’ And I think that helped propel my father in later years, when he began studying the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, Henry David Thoreau, and many others, to talk about noncooperation with evil. He was just a kid picking up little lessons from the next generation, which I think is important.
“This film will hopefully provide some lessons for the next generation. All people love sports, because either we played it, or somebody that’s near and dear to our heart played some kind of sport. I know I did. I played basketball, soccer, volleyball, and tennis.”
AV: Are there any stories or elements within the film that you’re excited for people to witness or learn?
BK: “Yeah, the humanization of my father. I think people have sought to humanize him in other ways, but they don’t realize this is a very human story. This was a young man who was called to an extraordinary work that I think he did well, and we get to see him in another light. We usually see him in the pulpit, ‘I Have a Dream,’ or when he opposed the war in Vietnam. We see him in marching clothes. Daddy loved basketball. Although he was right-handed, he had a mean left hook, I understand. I’m left-handed, so that kind of resonates with me [laughs].
“A lot of kids weren’t there. Obviously, they weren’t born. So they’re thinking this is somebody who’s bigger than life. And so, what it does is it brings them down to their world, and it helps them now to have curiosity to want to know more about Martin Luther King Jr., because there are so many other things. He also went into the pool halls. And you know, he could win against some of those folks that were regularly in the pool halls [laughs].”
The post ‘Hoops, Hopes, and Dreams’: Short film unveils how basketball fueled Dr. King’s vision for change appeared first on The Atlanta Voice.