The Trump administration on Monday (July 21) released a trove of records on the assassination of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, including FBI surveillance files on him. These documents, totalling around 240,000, were sealed since 1977 due to a court order.
The records were released despite the opposition from King’s family, and the civil rights group that he once led.
King was killed on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray was convicted of the assassination after he pleaded guilty. However, Ray later renounced that plea and maintained his innocence until he died in 1998. King’s family and others to date believe that Ray did not act alone.
Here is a look at what the documents say, and why there was opposition against their release.
But first, why has the Trump administration released the records now?
Soon after US President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January this year, he signed an executive order to declassify files related to the assassinations of President John F Kennedy (1963), lawyer Robert F Kennedy (1968), and Martin Luther King Jr.
While the JFK records were unsealed in March, some of the RFK files were made public in April.
On Monday, after releasing the records regarding King, Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “The American people deserve answers decades after the horrific assassination of one of our nation’s great leaders.”
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However, critics of Trump have alleged that the move was just a distraction, and not about transparency. That is because King’s files have been released amid growing calls for the President to unseal documents concerning the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself behind bars while awaiting trial in 2019. Trump last Friday ordered the Justice Department to request the release of grand jury testimony but stopped short of releasing the entire case file.
Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist, told the Associated Press, “It’s a desperate attempt to distract people from the firestorm engulfing Trump over the Epstein files and the public unravelling of his credibility among the MAGA base.”
In fact, Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr, tweeted on Monday, “Now, do the Epstein files.”
What do King’s records reveal?
The documents contain leads the FBI received after King’s assassination, and details of the CIA’s fixation on King’s pivot to international anti-war and anti-poverty movements in the years before he was killed, according to a report by AP.
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But several experts said that there were no major new revelations about the death of the civil rights leader in the documents. They also noted that the trove did not include FBI wiretap recordings of King and other materials that remain under court seal until 2027, according to a report by The New York Times.
David Garrow, the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning King biography, told The NYT, “I saw nothing that struck me as new.”
Why did the family of King oppose the release of documents?
King’s two living children, Martin III and Bernice, who were given access to the documents before their release, in a statement said that they “support transparency and historical accountability” but “object to any attacks on our father’s legacy or attempts to weaponise it to spread falsehoods”.
It is well known that FBI wiretaps and other surveillance on King were an attempt to find damaging material (like his extramarital affairs) on the Nobel laureate, which the agency hoped to use to derail the civil rights movement in the US.
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“The intent … was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement… These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth — undermining the dignity and freedoms of private citizens who fought for justice, designed to neutralise those who dared to challenge the status quo,” King’s children said in their statement.
