by April Ryan, Black Press USA Washington, DC Bureau Chief and White House Correspondent
To the dismay of the children of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, President Donald Trump has ordered the release of more than 240,000 pages of FBI documents related to the assassination of Dr. King in 1968.
“The emphasis here is to give Americans the truth,” said Trump Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields.
In late January of this year, President Trump signed Executive Order 14176, declassifying the records on the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.
The King FBI files have been sealed since 1977. Subsequently, the two surviving children of Dr. King, Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, oppose President Trump’s January executive order. The King children cite the personal nature of their father’s 1968 assassination as the reason to keep the files sealed.
Reverend Al Sharpton the head of the National Action Network and close friend of the King family, said in a statement, “We need to be crystal clear on the fact that Trump releasing the MLK assassination files is not about transparency or justice, it’s a desperate attempt to distract people from the firestorm engulfing Trump over the Epstein files and the public unraveling of his credibility among the MAGA base.”
When Black Press USA asked Fields to comment on the timing of the release of the Epstein files, Fields directed this news organization to the Department of Justice.
The King family requested to review the files before their release. Since the examination of the FBI files the family declared the federal government’s investigation of their father,” an invasion of privacy,” as they assert, “The intent of the government’s COINTELPRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle, and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement.”
In her piece for Vanity Fair, Bernice King writes, “Our mother, Coretta Scott King, prepared us for these repeated attempts saying, ‘They keep trying to assassinate your father over and over again.’”
The King family requests that “these files must be viewed within their full historical context.” Dr. King’s children also say, “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 (FBI).”
