On Monday, the Trump administration released thousands of documents on surveillance activities conducted by the FBI against Martin Luther King Jr. despite opposition from the family of the civil rights leader, who was assassinated in 1968.
The collection includes more than 240,000 pages of documents that had been sealed since 1977, when the bureau itself first gathered the various files and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
The Kings obtained early access to the documents and had their teams review them. Among the released pages are clues the FBI received after King’s assassination and details about the CIA’s fixation on the reverend’s support for international anti-war and anti-poverty movements in the years before he was killed.
In a lengthy statement released Monday, the reverend’s two children, Martin III, 67, and Bernice, 62, said their father’s murder had been a subject of “public curiosity for decades,” while emphasizing the personal nature of the matter. “We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief,” they added.
The Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, called such disclosure “unprecedented,” stating that the files include “discussion of potential leads, internal FBI memos detailing the progress of the case, information about James Earl Ray’s former cellmate who stated he discussed with Ray (King’s alleged material murderer) an alleged assassination plot, and more.”
The African American leader’s children said that the files “must be viewed within their full historical context” and that their father “was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by” then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
In 1964, Coretta Scott King, the wife of the civil rights leader, received a letter ordered by Hoover that also contained alleged tape recordings of her husband while he was having relations with other women. The material was also offered to reporters, but they refused to release it.
“Hoover was so angry, he had hate in his heart,” Martin Luther King III told The Washington Post in 2018. “Certainly he hated Dad. He had a vehement hatred of folks of color.” As a result, the King family has always believed that the FBI was involved in the assassination.
In a 1977 settlement agreement, the government turned over to the National Archives tapes, transcripts, wiretap records, and other surveillance documents at King’s Atlanta home and other offices. The files were supposed to remain secret until Jan. 31, 2027.
However, in January, after he took office in the White House, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing the release of documents related to the assassinations of M.L King, President John F. Kennedy, and his brother Robert.
The release of the M.L. King documents comes as Democrats and several of the president’s supporters have called for the release of another set of files, those related to Jeffrey Epstein. On Thursday, the president, for decades a friend of the pedophile financier who died in prison in 2019, told the Justice Department to demand the release of “all relevant testimony” from the grand jury, after the administration announced earlier this month that it would not release the documents in the case.
The Epstein case has been of deep concern to his MAGA base and indeed, he risks losing considerable support as a result of his involvement in it. Because of this, there have been numerous reports that suggest he may be looking for any other clamorous subject to distract MAGA world from the discontent brewing around it. In recent days The Hill reported that a furious Trump resorted to calling those MAGA critics “PAST supporters” and “weaklings” who “bought into this bullshit.”
Trump opponents saw the move to make documents on King’s murder public as an attempt to remove, at least for a few days, the Epstein case from the national spotlight and beyond. “It’s a desperate attempt to distract people from the firestorm engulfing Trump over the Epstein files and the public unraveling of his credibility among the MAGA base,” said Reverend and civil rights leader Al Sharpton.
Bernice King referring to the unsealing of the King documents said on her social platforms, “Now, do the Epstein files.”
