Washington, DC [US], July 22 (ANI): U.S. President Donald Trump has released thousands of files related to the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., despite opposition from most of King’s family, local media reported.
More than 6,000 documents, totaling nearly a quarter-million pages, were posted to the website of the National Archives late Monday afternoon, in what the administration hailed as a triumph of transparency, The New York Times reported.
These releases do not include FBI wiretap recordings of King and other materials that remain under court seal until 2027, according to experts cited by the outlet.
Trump administration officials said the King assassination documents include notes on leads pursued by investigators, interviews with people who knew his killer, James Earl Ray, and previously unreleased details of interactions with foreign intelligence services during the manhunt for Ray. Ray pleaded guilty to King’s murder but later renounced that plea and maintained his innocence until his death in 1998.
An estimated 200,000 pages of records released Monday 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. The records also contain reports documenting King’s well-documented history of extramarital relationships, according to The New York Times.
King’s surviving children, Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, argued in a statement Monday that their father had been “relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign.” They urged researchers and the public to view the material in the context of their father’s enormous contributions to American society.
In a press release, the Trump administration quoted Alveda King, King’s niece and a prominent Trump supporter, who praised the release as “a historic step toward the truth that the American people deserve,” according to The New York Times.
In another statement, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center—where Bernice King serves as CEO—responded to the release by emphasizing the continued relevance of King’s vision of nonviolence. “We underscore the work central to Dr. King’s dream: engaging Kingian Nonviolence, which The King Center has rebranded as Nonviolence365, for the strategic eradication of the Triple Evils of racism, poverty, and militarism. We invite the global citizenry to join us in working to rid our ‘World House’ of these interconnected, debilitating conundrums. This righteous work should be our collective response to renewed attention on the assassination of a great purveyor of true peace,” the Center said in its statement.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the documents were released to fulfill the directive Trump issued in a January executive order. (ANI)
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