Topline
An early analysis of a trove of FBI records on Martin Luther King Jr. released by the Trump administration has revealed little to no new information about his assassination or life so far, some academics said.
Many documents among the hundreds of thousands released by the Trump administration are difficult to ... More
The Trump administration made available more than 240,000 pages related to King’s 1968 assassination on Monday, though many of the documents—including several that remain redacted—are difficult to read after age and a digitizing process.
One audio file was included in the trove and featured parts of audio from a law enforcement interview with a sibling of James Earl Ray, who was convicted of King’s assassination, in which Jerry Ray reportedly responds to question about whether he believed his brother killed King: “I don’t think he did it, and nobody else does.”
Other documents featured accounts about an investigation into the assassination, a manhunt for James Earl Ray and details about Ray’s life, including his time in dance classes and locksmith school, The New York Times reported.
David Garrow, who authored a biography about King, told the Times the documents appeared to mostly include information that was already publicly disclosed, noting, “I saw nothing that struck me as new.”
Ryan Jones, a director at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, told the Associated Press he hoped the documents included FBI communication about its investigation into King’s assassination, though tapes and transcripts of the FBI’s surveillance of King reportedly remain under seal until 2027.
Other academics who have written about King questioned whether the documents included information that could link the FBI to his assassination, the Washington Post reported, even as documents implicating government officials have not immediately been found.
Lerone A. Martin, director of Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, said he doesn’t expect the records to have a “smoking gun” implicating the FBI.
Some of the documents repeated findings from records approved for release in 1998, the Post reported. Some of the filings feature details about an interview with inmates who had known Ray before he escaped from Missouri State Prison in 1967, including Raymond L. Curtis, who told the FBI that Ray referred to a “bounty” on President John F. Kennedy before Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and if “[Ray] got out in time and King was still alive, he would like to get the bounty on King.”
In a statement announcing the records’ release, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the documents included details about the FBI’s investigation into King’s assassination in 1968. Among the new documents were potential leads, internal FBI memos, records related to Ray’s cellmate and statements the cellmate made about discussing an alleged assassination plot with Ray, Gabbard said. Other records feature “never-before-seen” CIA records detailing “overseas intelligence” on the manhunt for Ray, according to Gabbard, who also said the records include evidence from Canadian law enforcement who joined the search.
Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, King’s living children, said in a statement the files should be “viewed within their full historical context” and engaged with “empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.” They repeated their claim Ray was “set up to take the blame” in King’s assassination, citing a 1999 wrongful death case in which a jury found King was the target of a larger conspiracy. They also claimed their father was “relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory and deeply disturbing disinformation campaign” by the FBI.
Bernice King and the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist and friend of the King family, criticized the Trump administration for releasing the documents as it faced mounting pressure to release filings related to financier Jeffrey Epstein. “Now, do the Epstein files,” Bernice King wrote on X. Sharpton said in a statement the release of the FBI’s records was a “desperate attempt to distract from the firestorm engulfing Trump over the Epstein files and the public unraveling of his credibility among the MAGA base.”
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January to unseal records related to King’s assassination in 1968, after they were sealed by a court order in 1977. The documents were originally scheduled for public release in 2027 before Ed Martin, then the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, requested in March for the FBI’s records to be released sooner. Martin cited the “strong public interest in understanding the truth about [King’s] assassination.” King’s family has opposed the public release of the FBI’s filings and requested the Trump administration to disclose the filings to them before they were unsealed. They claimed the records may alter the public perception of their father and the Civil Rights Movement, while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—the civil rights group which King led—argued the documents would have no interest to the public.