Martin Luther King files released: extent of FBI surveillance revealed

Times

22-07-2025

The US justice department has released more than 6,000 documents related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
The 240,000 pages of documents include records from the FBI but omit wiretap recordings of King the bureau made while surveilling the civil rights leader as part of an effort to discredit him.
Monday's release comes at a time when President Trump faces pressure from his own supporters to release files related to the death of the disgraced financier, Jeffrey Epstein.
King was shot dead while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, at 6.01pm on April 4, 1968. He was 39.
James Earl Ray, a segregationist and drifter, confessed to killing King and was sentenced to serve 99 years in prison. He later unsuccessfully tried to withdraw his guilty plea and seek a retrial. He died in prison in 1998.
The Trump administration said the assassination documents included interviews with people close to Ray as well as discussions of potential leads by investigators.
The single audio file released on Monday included parts of a law enforcement interview with Ray's brother, Jerry. In response to a question about whether he thought his brother killed King, he said: 'I don't think he did it and nobody else does.'
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said the documents 'had never been digitised and sat collecting dust in facilities across the federal government for decades, until today'.
Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, said: 'The American people have waited nearly 60 years to see the full scope of the federal government's investigation into Dr King's assassination.'
The ODNI said it was 'the first time these records are published online in one collection with minimal redactions', but added that some of the records had previously been made public through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Time and the digitising process have also rendered many of the pages difficult to read.
King advocated a non-violent struggle for equality as well as civil liberties and had previously received multiple death threats, surviving at least one earlier attempt to kill him. When he extended his campaign for equal rights for African-Americans to economic issues, the FBI falsely claimed it suspected King had ties to communism and the Soviet Union.
The FBI kept files on the civil rights leader from the 1950s through to his death which in recent years it has acknowledged as an example of 'abuse and overreach'.
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In 1979, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded there was a likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination of King and that Ray may have served as a scapegoat.
King's family requested people engage with the files 'with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family's continuing grief'.
'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 Luther King III, 67, and Bernice King, 62, said, referring to the FBI director at the time.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration released thousands of pages of digital documents related to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and the former president, John F Kennedy, who was killed in 1963.