“One Night In Miami…” fictionalizes the true February 25, 1964 meeting between Black icons Sam Cooke, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Jim Brown.

The fame each one achieved presented a unique set of personal, familial, cultural, and professional pressures few other Black men had navigated before.

Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” performed by multi-award-winning actor Leslie Odom Jr. tells a much truer story.

Perhaps the most mainstream of the foursome, Sam held a special place in American culture that two athletes and a Black Muslim activist could never achieve. But as an artist signed RGA Records, he also had the least autonomy.

Black voices were for praising, dancing, and romancing, not making waves.

But Sam was hardly the passive participant the movie painted him to be.

For nearly a decade and a half, Sam fronted the gospel group, the Soul Stirrers, and rather than sticking to the gospel blueprint, he lived up to their name, stirring things up. “Sam did it in a different way. He didn’t want to be that deep, pitiful singer, like ‘My mother died when I was young,’ Blind Boys, Pilgrim Travelers type stuff,” R. H. Harris of the Soul Stirrers once said. Sam Cooke brought a poppier sound to gospel, and combined with his breath control, soulful and deliberate intonation and enunciation, he emerged as a breath of fresh air to the genre.

Of course that’s not all he had. That, amplified by his dashing good looks, was bound to cut through the noise, and when Sam & the Soul Stirrers recorded “You Send Me,” it was over for everybody. Selling over 80,000 copies in Los Angeles alone, the 1957 crossover hit launched the group’s frontman into superstardom.

He quickly realized that even excluding race, the music industry was just slavery under a pseudonym. Artists did the work, labels reaped the rewards.

The public was even worse. Earlier this year, Sam Cooke was listed #3 in Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Singers of All Time.”

But in 1963’s racially charged America, Sam Cooke had to learn the hard way that he was just another n****r.

His Black wife knew better and warned him away from a confrontation at a Shreveport Holiday Inn that year. “They’ll kill you,” she begged. “They ain’t gonna kill me, because I’m Sam Cooke,” the exact sentiment echoed in “I’m not Black, I’m O.J.!” over 4 decades later. Eventually, they did kill Sam in a hotel altercation in Los Angeles.

His experiences as a Black man in music inspired Sam to be the change he wished to see in every corner of his world. Early on, he’d negotiated a contract granting him ownership of his own masters. As Sam’s skill in songwriting grew, he founded his own publishing company to maximize the money in his own pockets and keep it out of the industry’s. Black artists like Johnnie Taylor, Bobby Womack, and Billy Preston built their careers recording for SAR Records, founded by Sam Cooke, his associates, and the fruits of their labor.

The year of Sam’s altercation in Shreveport was the same year as the March on Washington and SCLC’s Birmingham Campaign. His emotions had reached a tipping point when he heard Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.” The irony of a white man shifting culture with a protest song, especially one with a voice like Dylan’s was not lost on Sam. Arrested, kicked out, and humiliated again and again, Sam had layers of lived experience that Dylan could never. He channeled every bit of it into his masterpiece, “A Change is Gonna Come.” It revives themes originally rooted in gospel and field spirituals like being born and/or running “by the river,” hard living, what’s “beyond the sky,” helping a brother, and being “down on my knees,” while weaving them into Sam’s modern day reality where white supremacy is so pervasive and effective, it even has Black allies.

In “One Night In Miami…,” Leslie Odom Jr. crushes it in the true-to-life depiction of the song’s February 7, 1964 debut on the “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.” As he sings, his famous friends experience life-changing, career-defining moments of their own: Cassius Clay becomes a member of the Nation of Islam as Muhammad Ali without Malcolm’s support, Malcolm X reconsiders his life priorities when his wife and children flee their firebombed home in terror and their pajamas, Jim Brown refuses to submit to the NFL’s demands and retires at the peak of his football career to pursue acting. In the end, we circle back to Sam/Leslie as a single tear leaks from the corner of his eye. NBC didn’t record that debut, and Sam vowed that he’d never sing it in public again. He and Bobby Womack agreed that the song’s somber tone and epic instrumental accompaniment “sounded like death.”

Before the year was through, Sam Cooke was killed in a “justifiable homicide” that’s still questioned today.

Still concerned about promoting anything but Black sunshine and rainbows, RCA disrespectfully released “A Change is Gonna Come” as a B-Side eleven days later.

Sam Cooke didn’t even live to see his own greatest work released, let alone the change he sang of.

But in the wake of his death, “A Change is Gonna Come” went on to be an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement, preserved in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry for its “cultural, historical, or aesthetic importance,” and quoted by the first Black president of the United States when acknowledging the significance of his victory.

And maybe, just maybe, a feature film documenting this historic moment shared by Black figures, directed by a Black woman (Regina King), starring four Black leads, produced by one of the world’s biggest streaming services is change beyond even Sam Cooke’s wildest dreams.

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