Newly released MLK files: What's in them and what's left out?

USA Today

4 days ago

Historians assessing the trove of newly released documents are cautioning people against the idea that they contain any groundbreaking information.
Among details included in a newly released trove of documents related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: assassin James Earl Ray took dance classes and had a penchant for using aliases based on James Bond novels, according to researchers.
But likely not among the nearly a quarter million pages released by the National Archives and Administration on July 21 is anything that changes the narrative cemented when Ray pleaded guilty to King's murder in 1969, historians say.
"The idea that there's some sort of secret document showing that J. Edgar Hoover did it is not how any of this works. Part of the challenge is getting the American public to understand it's nowhere near as exciting," said Michael Cohen, a University of California, Berkeley professor and author of a book on conspiracies in American politics.
"By all means the government should release all the documents that they have and they should have done it 20 years ago," Cohen said. "The issue is about what our expectations are for what's going to be found."
National Archives officials released the over 6,000 documents in accordance with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in January. Officials released the documents over objections from members of the King family.
The files are available for the public to read online at the National Archives website. Historians say it will take weeks to fully understand what they reveal.
Trump's Jan. 23, 2025 executive order also called for the release of records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
The full findings of the government investigations into the three killings have been hidden for decades, sparking wide-ranging speculation and preventing a sense of closure for many Americans. All three men were national and international icons whose assassinations — and the theories swirling around them — became the stuff of books, movies, controversy, and the pages of history itself.
More: Trump's release of assassination docs opens window into nation's most debated mysteries
What's in the King files?
The newly released records come from the FBI's investigation of the King assassination, records the Central Intelligence Agency deemed related to the assassination and a file from the State Department on the extradition of James Earl Ray, who pleaded guilty in 1969 to murdering King.
David Barrett, a historian at Villanova University, said the files will likely contain new, interesting information. But as was the case with the JFK files released in March, the material likely isn't groundbreaking.
"I'm not seeing anything that strikes me as surprising," said Barrett, author of multiple books on presidents and intelligence agencies. "Unless they want to write about the investigation, I don't know that this will have an impact on the scholarship."
Noteworthy in the files, Barrett said, are details concerning how the FBI connected Ray to King, how they found him and extradited him back to the U.S. from the United Kingdom, where he had fled.
"It does take weeks to go through these, so there might be some important revelatory things but I doubt it," said the political science professor. "It's not exactly what people were hoping for and not what the King family was fearing."
Many of the files are also illegible due to age and digitization. Archives officials said the agency was working with other federal partners to uncover records related to the King assassination and that records will be added to the website on a rolling basis.
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What's not in the King files?
Not among the newly released documents are details of FBI surveillance into King that historians say could include recordings agency director J. Edgar Hoover hoped to use as blackmail against the Georgia preacher.
Experts say Hoover's wiretappings of King's hotel rooms, which are believed to contain evidence of infidelity, are likely what his family fears being made public. The New York Times reported the recordings remain under seal pursuant to a court order until 2027.
But UC Berkeley professor Cohen said the documents likely haven't been revealed for multiple reasons.
"There's claims that these are major government secrets and so whatever they might contain might be true and that's not the case," Cohen said. "Any large-scale government investigation often includes all sorts of spurious claims, hearsay evidence, things of which there's no truth and part of the reason why they get withheld is bureaucratic inertia and also the need to check their veracity."
What does the FBI have to hide?
Hoover's recordings might also prove a double-edged sword for the FBI, according to Cohen: "Will these files contain things that will upset the King family? That's possible. But they'll also likely reveal just how massively the FBI violated King's civil liberties."
FBI agents began monitoring King in 1955, according to researchers at Stanford University. Hoover believed King was a communist and after the Georgia preacher criticized the agency's activities in the Deep South in 1964, the original FBI director began targeting King using the agency's counterintelligence program COINTELPRO, Stanford researchers said.
COINTELPRO was a controversial program that a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation slammed, saying:
"Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity," the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities said in its final report. "The Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association."
The agency went so far as to send King a recording secretly made from his hotel room that an agent testified was aimed at destroying King's marriage, according to a 1976 U.S. Senate investigation. King interpreted a note sent with the tape as a threat to release recording unless King committed suicide, the Senate report said.
MLK assassinated in Memphis, April 4, 1968
The official story of how King died is that he was killed on the balcony outside his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.
He stepped outside to speak with colleagues in the parking lot below and was shot in the face by an assassin. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term.
But Ray later tried to withdraw his confession and said he was set up by a man named Raoul. He maintained until his death in 1998 that he did not kill King.
The recanted confession and the FBI's shadowy operations under J. Edgar Hoover have sparked widespread conspiracy theories over who really killed the civil rights icon.
King's children have said they don't believe Ray was the shooter and that they support the findings of a 1999 wrongful death lawsuit that found that King was the victim of a broad conspiracy that involved government agents.
Department of Justice officials maintain that the findings of the civil lawsuit are not credible.
Read the MLK files
Looking to read the MLK files yourself? You can find them on the National Archives' website here.
Most of the files are scans of documents, and some are blurred or have become faint or difficult to read in the decades since King's assassination. There are also photographs and sound recordings.