Trump releases Martin Luther King assassination files

By Kanishka Singh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Justice Department on Monday released more than 240,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., including records from the FBI, which had surveilled the civil rights leader as part of an effort to discredit the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his civil rights movement.  

Files were posted on the website of the National Archives, which said more would be released. 

King died of an assassin's bullet in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, as he increasingly extended his attention from a nonviolent campaign for equal rights for African Americans to economic issues and calls for peace. His death shook the United States in a year that would also bring race riots, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump's administration released thousands of pages of digital documents related to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and former President John F. Kennedy, who was killed in 1963. 

Trump promised on the campaign trail to provide more transparency about Kennedy's death. Upon taking office, he also ordered aides to present a plan for the release of records relating to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and King.

The FBI kept files on King in the 1950s and 1960s - even wiretapping his phones - because of what the bureau falsely said at the time were his suspected ties to communism during the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union. In recent years, the FBI has acknowledged that as an example of "abuse and overreach" in its history.

The civil rights leader's family asked those who engage with the files to "do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family's continuing grief," and condemned "any attempts to misuse these documents."

"Now more than ever, we must honor his sacrifice by committing ourselves to the realization of his dream – a society rooted in compassion, unity, and equality," they said in a statement.

"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 III, 67, and Bernice, 62, said, referring to the then-FBI director. 

James Earl Ray, a segregationist and drifter, confessed to killing King but later recanted. He died in prison in 1998.

King's family said it had filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit in Tennessee in 1999 that led to a jury unanimously concluding "that our father was the victim of a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators, including government agencies as a part of a wider scheme. The verdict also affirmed that someone other than James Earl Ray was the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame. Our family views that verdict as an affirmation of our long-held beliefs."

Jowers, once a Memphis police officer, told ABC's Prime Time Live in 1993 that he participated in a plot to kill King. A 2023 Justice Department report called his claims dubious.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; additional reporting by Brad Brooks and Bianca Flowers; Editing by Donna Bryson and Stephen Coates)