Trump administration released FBI records on MLK Jr. despite his family's opposition

NBC News

5 days ago

The Trump administration has released records of the FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate's family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination.
The release involves more than 240,000 pages of records that had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
King's family, including his two living children, Martin III, 67, and Bernice, 62, were given advance notice of the release and had their own teams reviewing the records ahead of the public disclosure. Those efforts continued even as the government unveiled the digital trove.
In a lengthy statement released Monday, the King children called their father's assassination a 'captivating public curiosity for decades.' But the pair emphasized the personal nature of the matter and urged that 'these files must be viewed within their full historical context.'
It was not immediately clear Monday whether the release would shed any new light on King's life, the Civil Rights Movement or his murder.
'As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief — a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met -- an absence our family has endured for over 57 years,' they wrote wrote. '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 also repeated the family's long-held contention that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of assassinating King, was not solely responsible, if at all.
Bernice King was five years old when her father was killed. Martin III was 10.
President Donald Trump promised as a candidate to release files related to President John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination. When Trump took office in January, he signed an executive order to declassify the JFK records, along with those associated with Robert F. Kennedy's and King's 1968 assassinations.
The government unsealed the JFK records in March and disclosed some RFK files in April.
Besides fulfilling the intent of his January executive order, the latest release serves as another alternative headline for Trump as he tries to mollify supporters angry over his administration's handling of records concerning the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself behind bars while awaiting trial in 2019, during Trump's first presidency. Trump last Friday ordered the Justice Department to release grand jury testimony but stopped short of unsealing the entire case file.
Bernice King and Martin Luther King III did not mention Trump in their statement Monday. As of late Monday afternoon, the administration had not commented on the release.
The King records were initially intended to be sealed until 2027, until Justice Department attorneys asked a federal judge to lift the sealing order ahead of its expiration date.
Scholars, history buffs and journalists have been preparing to study the documents to find new information about his assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King co-founded in 1957 as the Civil Rights Movement blossomed, opposed the release. They, along with King's family, argued that the FBI illegally surveilled King and other civil rights figures, tapping their offices and phone lines with the aim of discrediting them and their movement.
It has long been established that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was intensely interested if not obsessed with King and others that he considered radicals. FBI records released previously show how Hoover's bureau wiretapped King's telephone lines, bugged his hotel rooms and used informants to get information against him.
'He was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),' the King children said in their statement.
'The intent of the government's COINTELPRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King's reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,' they continued. '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 neutralize those who dared to challenge the status quo.'
The Kings said they 'support transparency and historical accountability' but 'object to any attacks on our father's legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods.'
Opposition to King intensified even after the Civil Rights Movement compelled Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson to enact the Civil Right Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965. After those landmark victories, King turned much of his attention to economic justice and international peace. He was an outspoken critic of rapacious capitalism and the Vietnam War. King argued that political rights alone were not enough in an uneven economy. Many establishment figures like Hoover viewed King as a communist threat.
King was assassinated as he was aiding striking sanitation workers in Memphis, part of his explicit turn toward economic justice.
Ray plead guilty to assassinating King. He later renounced that plea and maintained his innocence until his death in 1998.
Members of King's family, and others, have long questioned whether Ray acted alone, or if he was even involved. Coretta Scott King for the probe to be reopened, and in 1998, then-Attorney General Janet Reno directed the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department to take a new look. The Justice Department said it 'found nothing to disturb the 1969 judicial determination that James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King.'
In their latest statement, Bernice King and Martin Luther King III repeated their assertions that Ray was set up, pointing to a 1999 civil case in which a Memphis jury in a wrongful death case concluded that Martin Luther King Jr. had been the target of a conspiracy.
'As we review these newly released files,' the Kings said, 'we will assess whether they offer additional insights beyond the findings our family has already accepted.'