Thousands of pages of documents pertaining to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. were made public by the administration of US President Donald Trump on Monday, in spite of the civil rights leader’s family.
According to a statement released by the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, “The American people have waited nearly sixty years to see the full scope of the federal government’s investigation into Dr King’s assassination”
“We are ensuring that no stone is left unturned in our mission to deliver complete transparency on this pivotal and tragic event in our nation’s history.”
More than 230,000 pages of documents were being made public, “with minimal redactions for privacy reasons,” according to Gabbard.
Following his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declassifying documents related to the 1960s assassinations of King, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and President John F. Kennedy. Records of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 and files pertaining to Robert F. Kennedy’s murder in June 1968 were made public by the National Archives in March and April, respectively.
King was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968. King’s children have questioned whether James Earl Ray was the assassin, despite the fact that he was found guilty of the murder and passed away in prison in 1998.
Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, King’s two surviving children, said in a statement on Monday that they “support transparency and historical accountability” but expressed concern that the documents might be used for “attacks on our father’s legacy.”
They said in a joint statement that the civil rights leader was the victim of a “invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign” during his lifetime, which was planned by J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI at the time.
“Discredit, dismantle, and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,” they claimed, was the stated goal of the FBI campaign.”These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth.”
“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”
The Warren Commission, which looked into the shooting of John F. Kennedy, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine sharpshooter, was the only person responsible.
However, the official conclusion hasn’t done much to stop rumors that Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, Texas, was the result of a darker conspiracy, and the government files’ delayed release has only served to feed these theories.
