Tomorrow is already the third Monday in January, which means it's Martin Luther King Day in the United States and a paid holiday for people who happen to work for the government or certain government-adjacent contracting. TCM is once again doing "special" programming for the day. During the daytime, that only means running a bunch of Sidney Poitier movies, because there weren't many black stars back in the studio era that TCM can promote with an entire day of programming that won't put a more degrading spotlight on blacks as the hired help.
At least in prime time, however, we get something a bit different, with several documentaries about the US civil rights movement. And there is one non-documentary movie, Song of Freedom at 4:30 AM Jan. 16, which stars Paul Robeson. I think a couple of the movies, specifically Crisis (1:00 AM Jan. 16 and decidedly not the Cary Grant drama) have shown up repeatedly in TCM's Martin Luther King Day programming of past years.
I actually have a Sidney Poitier movie scheduled for tomorrow, having had it on my DVR for a while. It is, however, not one of the movies in TCM's line-up tomorrow; otherwise, I would have scheduled the blog post for today in order to be able to point out when it was airing.
FXM, mildly surprisingly, doesn't seem to be doing anything. I'm not surprised that the FXM Retro block during the morning doesn't have anything special; apart from Sidney Poitier's No Way Out (which will be on TCM anyway) there not a whole lot that they could program. But I could swear I've seen times in the past (notably the first Juneteenth after the George Floyd Mostly Peaceful Protests) where they did go out of their way to pander.
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