Trump administration releases files on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has made public more than 230,000 pages of documents connected to the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
In a statement on Monday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard described the move as “unprecedented,” citing the president’s pledge to uphold “complete transparency.”
Trump had earlier signed an executive order directing the declassification of records related to the assassinations of Dr. King, former President John F. Kennedy, and former Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
The FBI first compiled King’s records in the 1970s and handed them over to the National Archives and Records Administration, where they remained under a court-imposed seal since 1977.
The National Archives previously released documents related to the JFK assassination in March, and materials tied to Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 murder in April.
King was killed in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. Though James Earl Ray was convicted and later died in prison in 1998, King’s children have long questioned the official narrative.
Ahead of the release, King’s surviving children, Martin Luther King III, 67, and Bernice King, 62, were notified in advance and had legal and historical teams review the records. Their review continued as the government rolled out the newly available documents online.
In a lengthy statement released Monday, the siblings acknowledged that their father’s assassination has been the subject of “captivating public curiosity for decades.” Still, they emphasized the deeply personal nature of the records, urging the public to interpret them in their “full historical context.”
They pointed to the FBI’s covert surveillance efforts, led by then-director J. Edgar Hoover, as evidence of a "predatory and invasive campaign" to discredit and undermine both Dr. King and the broader Civil Rights Movement.
“These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth,” the King children wrote.
As of Monday, it was unclear whether the documents reveal any new insights into King’s life, his assassination, or the broader context of the civil rights era.