The enduring legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has long existed as a powerful, yet pliant, force in American public life.

Even during his early rise, political figures understood the potency of aligning with, or opposing, King’s moral authority. John F. Kennedy, for instance, gained political advantage during a tight 1960 presidential race by intervening on King’s behalf after an Atlanta arrest, forging crucial links with Black voters. Years later, Richard Nixon considered reaching out to King, but instead found political mileage in casting the civil rights leader as a rabble-rousing lawbreaker, solidifying Nixon’s “law and order” image.

The dynamic of selective engagement and strategic distortion cropped up once again this week with the Trump administration’s disclosure of documents from the National Archives related to King. The surprise release, at a time when the White House has been seeking to redirect attention from the Jeffrey Epstein controversy, reignited the longstanding debate over King’s contested narrative.

This disclosure, which brought few new revelations, was particularly anticipated by people who look for signs that King’s assassination was orchestrated, or that King himself was not the flawless moral figure he is often portrayed to be.

King’s daughter, Bernice King, observed in a statement after the files’ release that “a 1967 poll reflected that he was one of the most hated men in America.” She added that “many who quote him now and evoke him to deter justice today would likely hate, and may already hate, the authentic King.”

Those words point to a persistent truth, said Dr. John Kirk, a civil rights historian at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. King’s monumental impact was never static, he said. Instead, it became a malleable narrative, continually reshaped by political forces across the ideological spectrum to serve their divergent aims.