The records were made available to the Kings in advance, and their own teams examined them. Even after the government allowed public access, those efforts persisted. Whether the documents will reveal anything new about King’s life, the Civil Rights Movement, or his murder was unclear on Monday.
As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, they noted that their family has suffered from his untimely death for more than 57 years. His wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met have all suffered greatly. We kindly request that anyone involved in the publication of these files do so with compassion, moderation, and consideration for the ongoing loss of our family.
The family’s long-standing claim that James Earl Ray, the man found guilty of King’s murder, was not entirely to blame, if at all, was also reiterated.
When her father was murdered, Bernice King was five years old. Martin III was ten years old.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, described the revelation as unusual in a statement from his office, adding that many of the information had been digitized for the first time to enable it. She commended President Donald Trump for bringing attention to the problem.
Release is transparency to some, a distraction for others
During his campaign, Trump pledged to make the documents pertaining to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy public. Trump signed an executive order to declassify the JFK records, as well as those related to the 1968 assassinations of King and Robert F. Kennedy, when he took office in January.
In March, the government unveiled the JFK archives, and in April, it made some RFK files public.
Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr., who is a vocal conservative and has distanced herself from King’s children on a number of issues, including the FBI files, made a statement as part of Gabbard’s office release. Alveda King expressed her gratitude to President Trump for his openness.
In a separate post on Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi shared a photo of herself in her office with Alveda King on social media.
The most recent release not only complies with Trump’s executive order, but it also provides the president with another alternative headline as he attempts to appease supporters who are upset about how his administration handled documents related to the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial during Trump’s first term in office. Trump did not fully unseal the case file last Friday, but he did order the Justice Department to make grand jury testimony public.
Trump was not mentioned by Martin Luther King III or Bernice King in their remarks on Monday.
Not all civil rights advocates were so stingy.
According to Rev. Al Sharpton, Trump’s release of the MLK assassination documents is not about justice or openness. It’s a last-ditch effort to divert attention from the controversy surrounding Trump’s Epstein files and the public’s erosion of his support among MAGA members.
Records mean a new trove of research material
Originally scheduled to remain sealed until 2027, the Justice Department’s lawyers requested a federal judge to lift the sealing order before it expired.
Journalists, historians, and academics have been getting ready to examine the records in order to learn more about his murder in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.
The release was opposed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King co-founded in 1957 when the Civil Rights Movement was taking off. Along with King’s family, they claimed that the FBI unlawfully tapped the phones and offices of King and other civil rights leaders in an effort to undermine them and their movement.
It has long been known that King and other people he deemed radicals piqued the curiosity, if not the obsession, of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. According to previously made public FBI records, Hoover’s bureau utilized informants, bugged King’s hotel rooms, and wiretapped his phone lines in order to obtain material against him.
“He was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated byJ. Edgar Hooverthrough the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),” the kids stated in their statement.
In addition to monitoring, the government’s COINTELPRO effort aimed to undermine, discredit, and destroy Dr. King’s reputation as well as the American Civil Rights Movement as a whole,” they added. In addition to being intrusions of privacy, these acts were deliberate attacks on the truth that undermined the freedoms and dignity of private persons who stood up for justice and were intended to silence those who dared to question the status quo.
The Kings stated that while they are in favor of openness and historical responsibility, they are against any assaults on our father’s legacy or attempts to use it as a weapon to disseminate lies.
Even after the Civil Rights Movement forced President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposition to King grew. Following those historic triumphs, King focused a lot of his emphasis on global peace and economic fairness. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and greedy capitalism. King maintained that in an unequal economy, political rights by themselves were insufficient. Hoover and other establishment leaders saw King as a communist danger.
King s children still don t accept the original explanation of assassination
King’s overt shift toward economic justice included his assassination while he was in Memphis supporting striking sanitation workers.
Ray entered a guilty plea to King’s murder. Later, he rejected that defense and insisted on his innocence until his passing in 1998.
King’s family members and others have long questioned if Ray was engaged in the incident or if he acted alone. In 1998, then-Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to reexamine the investigation after Coretta Scott King requested that it be reopened. According to the Justice Department, there was nothing to challenge the 1969 court ruling that James Earl Ray killed Dr. King.
Bernice King and Martin Luther King III reiterated their claims that Ray was set up in their most recent statement, citing a 1999 civil case in which a Memphis jury found that Martin Luther King Jr. had been the victim of a conspiracy including wrongful death.
The Kings stated, “We will examine these recently made public files to see if they provide any new information beyond what our family has already agreed upon.”
Thanks to AP
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