Trump admin releases MLK files amid rising pressure over Epstein documents: What are Martin Luther King Files?
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Trump admin releases MLK files amid rising pressure over Epstein documents: What are Martin Luther King Files?")
Martin Luther King Jr and US President Donald Trump Photograph: (Reuters)
The Trump administration released over 240,000 pages on Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, including FBI surveillance records. The move came amid pressure to release the Epstein Files. More documents will be posted soon, according to the National Archives website
The Donald Trump administration on Monday (July 22) released more than 240,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr amid massive pressure on it to release the Epstein Files. It also released records from the FBI, which had surveilled the civil rights leader as part of an effort to discredit the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his civil rights movement. Files were posted on the website of the National Archives. The website stated that more would be released soon.
Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, as he increasingly extended his attention from a nonviolent campaign for equal rights for African Americans to economic issues and calls for peace. His death shook the United States in a year that would also bring race riots, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump's administration released thousands of pages of digital documents related to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and former President John F. Kennedy, who was killed in 1963.
As per news agency Reuters, the FBI kept files on King in the 1950s and 1960s - even wiretapping his phones - because of what the bureau falsely said at the time were his suspected ties to communism during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. In recent years, the FBI has acknowledged that as an example of "abuse and overreach" in its history.
What are the Martin Luther King Jr. Assassination Files?
King was extensively surveilled by the FBI under J Edgar Hoover, who considered him a threat due to alleged communist associations and his civil rights activism. The FBI gathered thousands of pages of wiretaps, surveillance notes, and reports.
Some of these were released over the years, but many remain classified or heavily redacted. The files have now been released by the FBI. The documents also contain HSCA Files. In the late 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) reopened investigations into the murders of JFK and MLK. The HSCA concluded that King was likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, not solely by James Earl Ray (the man convicted of the crime). Additionally, in 1999, a civil trial in Memphis concluded that there was a conspiracy involving government agencies in King's assassination. The jury found that Lloyd Jowers (a local businessman) and others were part of a plot. However, this verdict is not legally binding in the criminal context and is not universally accepted by historians or government agencies.
How Martin Luther King Jr's family reacted?
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The civil rights leader's family asked those who engage with the files to "do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family's continuing grief," and condemned “any attempts to misuse these documents.” "Now more than ever, we must honor his sacrifice by committing ourselves to the realization of his dream – a society rooted in compassion, unity, and equality," they said in a statement.
"During our father's lifetime, 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," the family, including his two living children, Martin III, 67, and Bernice, 62, said, referring to the then-FBI director.
James Earl Ray, a segregationist and drifter, confessed to killing King but later recanted. He died in prison in 1998. King's family said it had filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit in Tennessee in 1999 that led to a jury unanimously concluding “that our father was the victim of a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators, including government agencies as a part of a wider scheme. The verdict also affirmed that someone other than James Earl Ray was the shooter, and that Ray was set up to take the blame. Our family views that verdict as an affirmation of our long-held beliefs.”
