You might not think of watching television as an appropriate way to memorialize a man as serious and committed as Martin Luther King Jr.

Television tends to subvert holidays even as it embraces them, sucking dry their true meaning and spitting them out, repackaged and trivialized, as a theme-park parade of cartoon characters or sappy made-for-TV movie.

But television this week -- thanks largely to three stirring documentaries on PBS, along with a Nightline town hall meeting and an exceptional Disney movie on ABC -- will offer one of the most informed discussions of race and thoughtful analyses of civil rights history available anywhere in our culture. It is a tribute to the greatness and power of Martin Luther King Jr. that the medium, rather than perverting the late civil rights leader's legacy, has been inspired by it to present meaningful and enlightened programming.

One show in particular, Two Towns of Jasper, a documentary filmed in the Texas town where in 1998 a black man was chained behind a pickup truck and dragged to his death, presents a new and better way of looking at race on-screen.

Since the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995, the model that has guided most television coverage of race is that of two Americas, one black and one white. Made by two directors, one African-American and one white, Two Towns takes that model to its logical extreme.

Through interviews with townspeople, the documentary, which was filmed during the trials of the three men charged with killing Jasper resident James Byrd Jr., uses attitudes about the case to explore deeper feelings about race.

Whitney Dow, the white director, worked with an all-white crew and filmed only on the white side of town. Marco Williams, the African-American director, worked with an all-black crew and filmed only on the black side of town. The real triumph of Two Towns is the way it ultimately explodes the model by presenting a sensitive and nuanced picture of race relations as they occur throughout society, not just in Jasper, but in communities throughout the land.

"There's no doubt that the concept of a black director and white director is a hook that will hopefully bring people to the film. But once they start to watch, our belief is that viewers will start to understand that the film goes beyond the hook to show a more subtle picture of racism and race," said Marco Williams, the 46-year-old African-American half of the directing team.

"Our hope is that viewers will make connections back to their own lives and communities and get it that Jasper isn't somewhere "down there" or somewhere other than the place in which they live. Jasper is America."

ABC News' Nightline gets it. The program will devote two shows -- on Tuesday and Thursday nights -- to the film and will produce a town hall meeting held in Jasper led by Ted Koppel and carried live on PBS Thursday during prime time.

"Normally, we would never have Ted do something for someone other than ABC," said Tom Bettag, Nightline's executive producer. "But David Westin [president of ABC News] gave his permission, saying this documentary is significant enough that we should go ahead and do it. This is not like anything we have ever done or probably will ever do again. But David agreed that this documentary is that powerful and important."

'Sounder' remake

You can observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday beginning tonight with the "Wonderful World of Disney's" remake of the young person's classic, Sounder, which arrives 30 years after the feature-film debut. I know Disney is the very conglomerate responsible for commercializing and trivializing much of our national mythology, but every so often, ABC's "Wonderful World of Disney" actually does make a truly wonderful TV movie, like Cinderella, which featured the African-American actress Brandy playing the lead.

Add this version of Sounder to the A-list. The resonant coming-of-age story plays the mythic chords of adolescent Southern memory as well any this side of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory. This is the same hardscrabble, Depression-era South as that of A Christmas Memory, but here it is seen from the African-American point of view. I can't think of a better way outside the classroom to make sure that the ugly economic and racial facts of life from that era are not forgotten generation to generation. There's an added treat for local viewers: A Baltimore teen, Daniel Lee Robertson III stars in Sounder. It airs at 7 tonight on WMAR (Channel 2).

Tomorrow night, PBS takes the lead with two stirring documentaries, The Murder of Emmett Till, from the "American Experience" series, and Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, from the equally prestigious "P.O.V." independent film showcase.

The story of Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago who made the mistake while visiting relatives in the Jim Crow South of 1955 of whistling at a white woman, has been told before in such venues as the acclaimed PBS series "Eyes on the Prize." But it has not been told in as compelling and a complete a way as it is here, or put in historical context as the "spark" that set the civil rights movement in motion. Three months after Till's brutally disfigured body was fished from the Tallahatchie River and then displayed in an open casket by his mother for thousands to see in Chicago, the Montgomery bus boycotts began.

The story of Bayard Rustin, backstage adviser to King, has not been told in full on television. Ironically, one reason for that involves mixed feelings about Rustin, who was a homosexual, within the civil rights movement itself. As this film shows, African-American civil rights leaders played a large role in almost keeping Rustin out of the history books despite his accomplishments as lead organizer of the legendary 1963 March on Washington. This is the kind of honesty in television that separates history from propaganda.

While both MPT (Channels 22 and 67) and WETA (Channel 26) will carry The Murder of Emmett Till at 9 tomorrow night, only WETA will air Brother Outsider at 10. MPT will show Brother Outsider at 11 p.m. on Jan. 26.

Listening, not asking

Thankfully, MPT and WETA both will show Two Towns of Jasper at 8 Thursday night followed by the town hall meeting with Koppel at 9:30. Later that night at 11:35, Nightline will offer a shorter, taped version of the gathering in Jasper, airing locally on WMAR (Channel 2).

The film itself is more anthropology than journalism. That is to say, Williams and co-director Whitney Dow behave more like ethnographers than reporters. They enter a community with the aim of viewing culture from the inside out, at its own pace, rather than asking questions and demanding answers.

Williams, who teaches filmmaking at New York University, points to scenes in the film that were shot at an African-American beauty salon in Jasper as representative of what can be gained with such an approach. Some of the most revealing moments occur at the salon. Williams said he overcame the gender difference and got the women to reveal their feelings in part by "doing what men don't do very well: listening."

"I let them define the content. I didn't go in with any effort to steer them one way or the other. I would simply come in and say, 'How you all doing today? What's going on?' And they would start talking."

That might sound simple, but this film is the product of two people who have thought long and hard about the relationship between film and society. They have created a documentary that will be discussed in film and cultural studies classes for years to come.

Much of that conversation will be about the black director / white director hook that has been the focus of most pre-air publicity. But Dow points to another level of race involved in the production process that has not been so discussed. After 18 months of filming without reviewing each other's work, the two directors set about editing their footage into rough cuts for the other to see. Dow worked with a black editor, while the person editing Williams' work was white.

"It was great for me, because I think in both communities we tend to view the other as monolithic. And the danger could have been that Marco's viewpoint would come to represent for me the viewpoint of the entire black community. The fact that we were able to find an editor for my work who was so different in her feelings and viewpoints than Marco, really helped me remember black opinion was not monolithic," the 41-year-old Dow said.

Ultimately, that unwillingness to exploit the extremes and show only the disconnect is what makes Two Towns such an exceptional film.

Sure, race divides. But so does gender, age, education, ethnicity, social class and all sorts of other factors.

Shame on the mainstream media for being so closed to anything but the viewpoint of dominant culture that it took Rodney King and the O.J. Simpson trial to finally remove its blinders on race. But what the mainstream media has done since is trade one stereotype for another.

Seeing race as a disconnect between two monolithic bodies of people is as uninformed as still seeing international affairs as a standoff between two superpowers.

You will meet racists on the white side of town, as well as African-Americans so deeply suspicious of whites that you doubt a dialogue will ever be possible. But you also will meet well-intentioned whites who are trying to make a difference, as well as blacks who already have changed the landscape of Jasper by getting elected mayor and members of the common council.

"Because the filmmakers are so honest about it, this film has all kinds of grays and nuances," Nightline's Bettag said. ""It isn't your classic good guys / bad guys sort of thing. And that's why I so admire it.

"It's much more subtle in what it has to say about all of us: We all have tinges of racism within us, and people who have some racism in them are not necessarily totally evil people. Racism is something that we can talk about, that we can deal with, that we can put out in the open. It can be helped by sunlight. It can be disinfected by sunlight."