Outside the Beltway

Records of FBI MLK Investigation Released

James Joyner · Tuesday, July 22, 2025 · 9 comments

AP (“Trump administration releases FBI records on MLK Jr. despite his family’s opposition“):

The Trump administration on Monday 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 digital document dump includes 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.

While I understand that the family has privacy concerns, I don’t see how they can possibly outweigh the public’s right to know what their government was doing. King is a seminal figure in American history. Indeed, he’s the only one with his own national holiday. (Technically, President’s Day is “George Washington’s Birthday,” but we haven’t called it that in decades.)

In a lengthy statement released Monday, King’s two living children, Martin III, 67, and Bernice, 62, said their father’s killing has been a “captivating public curiosity for decades.” But the pair emphasized the personal nature of the matter and urged that the files “be viewed within their full historical context.”

The Kings got advance access to the records and had their own teams reviewing them. Those efforts continued even as the government granted public access. Among the documents are leads the FBI received after King’s assassination and details of the CIA’s fixation on King’s pivot to international anti-war and anti-poverty movements in the years before he was killed. It was not immediately clear whether the documents shed 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. “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.

While I don’t believe in any of the conspiracy theories around the JFK, RFK, or MLK assassinations, the best way to examine them is with easy access to all of the investigative documents. How else would scholars, reporters, and other interested parties assess the evidence?

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 MLK’s 1968 assassinations.

The government unsealed the JFK records in March and disclosed some RFK files in April.

Which would seem to debunk the “I question the timing” trolling:

Bernice King and Martin Luther King III did not mention Trump in their statement Monday. But Bernice King later posted on her personal Instagram account a black-and-white photo of her father, looking annoyed, with the caption “Now, do the Epstein files.”

And some civil rights activists did not spare the president.

“Trump releasing the MLK assassination files is not about transparency or justice,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton. “It’s a desperate attempt to distract people from the firestorm engulfing Trump over the Epstein files and the public unraveling of his credibility among the MAGA base.”

As to why the records were sealed to begin with:

The King records were initially intended to be sealed until 2027, until Justice Department attorneys asked a federal judge to lift the sealing order early. Scholars, history buffs and journalists have been preparing to study the documents for 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. The group, along with King’s family, argued that the FBI illegally surveilled King and other civil rights figures, hoping to discredit 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 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 gather information, including evidence of King’s extramarital affairs.

“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 King children said in their statement.

“The intent … 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 Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After those victories, King turned his attention to economic justice and international peace. He criticized rapacious capitalism and the Vietnam War. King asserted that political rights alone were not enough to ensure a just society. Many establishment figures like Hoover viewed King as a communist threat.

But that rumor and innuendo has been public knowledge as long as I can remember. Releasing the evidence of the degree to which Hoover abused his power in the pursuit of King is in the public interest.