Last Monday, the Trump administration released almost 250,000 pages of federal records in connection with the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., including FBI surveillance of the civil rights leader. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard made the announcement via a press release, and the materials were made available on the website of the National Archives. The trove contained FBI documents and notes on investigations, as well as decades of news clippings on the case, but did not include the transcripts of wiretaps of King.
The release of the King files, which originally had been sealed until 2027, follows those of documents and files related to two other prominent US assassinations of the 1960s, those of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy. All these files were made available pursuant to an executive order issued by Trump soon after beginning his second term last January.
The Kennedy and King files contained very little new information. Noted King biographer David Garrow said, after looking at the King files, “There is nothing new or notable in what was released yesterday,” and that much of the material had been in the public domain for decades. This is precisely why Trump was willing to release the files, enabling him to pose as an advocate of “transparency” and pretending some sympathy with those who believe that all the assassinations of that decade, including that of Malcolm X, were the result of conspiracies at the highest levels.
King’s two surviving children, Bernice and Martin III, had opposed the release of the files. They were clearly suspicious of Trump’s attempt to manipulate the matter, and they issued a statement declaring, “While we support transparency and historical accountability, we object to any attacks on our father’s legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods.”
They called for the files to be seen “within their full historical context,” and added a reminder that King had been “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).” Among the concerns of the family was the fear of renewed attention to the well-established extramarital relations of King, unearthed via the FBI surveillance and very likely sensationalized in the reports filed by agents who were seeking to meet the expectations of J. Edgar Hoover, whose racism and pathological hatred of King were well known.
Trump’s executive order was entirely consistent with the trademark cynicism and demagogy of the would-be Führer in the White House, for whom the “Big Lie” is standard operating procedure. Attorney General Pam Bondi declared with a straight face that, “The American people deserve answers decades after the horrific assassination of one of our nation’s great leaders.” But it is her boss who recently welcomed Afrikaner “refugees” from South Africa, who has ordered that the names of Confederate “heroes” be restored to various military bases, and who is attempting to roll back voting rights and other gains of the mass civil rights movement.
Moreover, the political views of King, the man Bondi now calls a “great leader,” were substantially to the left of the current Democratic mayoral candidate in New York, Zohran Mamdani, the same man whom Trump has been calling a “Communist lunatic” almost every day for the last month. It is not very difficult to deduce Trump’s real estimation of Martin Luther King.
As for the precise timing of the release of the King files, that is undoubtedly connected to the mounting crisis facing Trump over the demands for the release of the Epstein files, including the list of powerful corporate and political figures who made use of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal sex-trafficking operation involving young girls. The release of the King files looks like a clumsy attempt at distraction from the other files, and the growing likelihood that the continuing Epstein scandal, almost six years after his reported “suicide” in a Manhattan jail cell, will ensnare Trump personally.
Regardless of Trump’s cynical calculations, however, the renewed attention to the assassination of Martin Luther King and to the legacy of the slain civil rights leader raises important historical issues.
James Earl Ray was arrested in London after a long manhunt. He at first pleaded guilty, and was tried, convicted and sentenced to a 99-year prison term. Ray later attempted to recant his plea, saying he had been set up to take the blame for killing King. The King family, including Coretta Scott King before her death, believed him. The family pointed to the fact that the investigation of King’s assassination had been carried out by the very same FBI, under Hoover, that had targeted him in a years-long campaign of defamation and spying. They insisted on further investigation, and filed a wrongful death lawsuit that led to a 1999 verdict that found that King had been the victim of a huge conspiracy, and not of a lone racist gunman.
Fifty-seven years after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., it is necessary not only to expose the obscene attempt of the fascist Trump to make political capital of his death, but also to restate King’s legacy, and that of the movement he led.
In the three years between the legislative victories of the mass civil rights movement and King’s death, amidst the growing escalation of the Vietnam War as well as the rebellions in urban ghettos throughout the US, King became increasingly critical in his estimation of what had been achieved and what remained to be done. In 1967 he denounced the Vietnam War, an action that angered Lyndon Johnson and other erstwhile “allies” in the Democratic Party. King was denounced by the editorial board of the New York Times and elsewhere. In his speeches on Vietnam, King emphasized the connection between war abroad and attacks on democratic rights and living conditions at home. He soon spelled this out further, with the launching of the Poor People’s Campaign.
King’s fateful trip to Memphis in late March 1968 was part of his struggle to build the Poor People’s Campaign, which had begun in Washington, with the aim of calling attention to the issues of poverty through civil disobedience actions. King’s political outlook remained one of reforming capitalism, but his actions also raised the possibility of a growing mass movement in the working class, one that could be a far greater threat to the capitalist status quo.
His specific aim in Memphis was to aid the union organizing campaign of the city’s black sanitation workers. The 1,300 workers had begun a strike after the horrific deaths of two workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, crushed in a malfunctioning sanitation truck. These deaths were the last straw for the sanitation workers, who were paid poverty wages for backbreaking work under appalling safety conditions, and without overtime pay or other benefits.
Fifty-seven years later, little has changed on the issues of imperialist war, unsafe workplaces and capitalist exploitation—except for the worse. The US has seen a recent spate of workplace deaths, including that of Ronald Adams Sr., the veteran autoworker crushed to death last April at a Stellantis plant in Michigan, a tragic and preventable death that has led the International Workers Alliance of Rank and File Committees to initiate a rank-and-file investigation.
The issues of war, steadily widening inequality and the growing danger of fascism around the world make it all the more vital that the lessons of Martin Luther King’s struggle be learned and applied today. Within a few years of his death, his insistence on linking the struggles for full democratic rights to those against war and poverty had been pushed aside. What remained of the official civil rights movement, presided over by such figures as Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young—people who had opposed or been lukewarm toward the Poor People’s Campaign and King’s break with the establishment on the issue of Vietnam—embraced the policy of affirmative action, which soon became part of the entire edifice of identity politics with which the ruling class, and the Democratic Party above all, has worked, through racial, ethnic and gender politics, to divide the working class and make it pay for the deepening crisis of American capitalism.