The Trump administration has unveiled records of the FBI’s monitoring of Martin Luther King Jr – despite fierce resistance from the murdered Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights organisation which he headed until his 1968 killing.
The digital archive release encompasses more than 240,000 pages of documents that had been kept under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first compiled the records and handed them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
In a comprehensive statement issued on Monday, King’s two surviving children, Martin III, 67, and Bernice, 62, said their father’s murder has remained a “captivating public curiosity for decades.”
However, the siblings stressed the intimate nature of the issue, pleading that “these files must be viewed within their full historical context.”
The King family secured early access to the papers and deployed their own teams to examine them. Those reviews carried on even as the government permitted public access, reports the Mirror.
Do we know what evidence the files contain?
It remained unclear on Monday whether the documents would reveal any fresh insights into King’s life, the Civil Rights Movement or his killing.
“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 stated. “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.”
The family has long maintained that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of assassinating King, was not solely responsible, if at all.
Bernice King was just five years old when her father was tragically killed at the age of 39, while Martin III was 10. A statement from the office of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard described the disclosure as “unprecedented”, adding that many of the records had been digitised for the first time.
Commendation for Trump
She commended President Donald Trump for championing the issue.
Trump pledged during his campaign to release files related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
Upon taking office in January, he signed an executive order to declassify the JFK records, along with those associated with Robert F. Kennedy’s and MLK’s 1968 assassinations.
Gabbard’s office announcement included a statement from Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s niece, who is a vocal conservative and has diverged from King’s children on various topics – including the FBI files.
Trump’s order
Alveda King expressed her gratitude to President Trump for his “transparency.”
In a separate event, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s social media account showcased a photo of her with Alveda King. In addition to carrying out Trump’s order, this latest release provides an alternative headline for the president as he attempts to placate supporters upset over his administration’s management of records related to the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein took his own life in prison while awaiting trial in 2019, during Trump’s initial presidency. Last Friday, Trump instructed the Justice Department to disclose grand jury testimony but refrained from unsealing the entire case file.