What we need to know about the King assassination files pending release

ATLANTA — Any day now, thousands of previously classified documents related to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. are set to be released — shedding new light on his 1968 assassination.

Or maybe not.

During his first week in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the release of thousands of classified government documents about the deaths of President John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy.

Last week, on the heels of the release of a tranche of documents connected to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said documents related to King and Robert F. Kennedy, who was also killed in 1968, would be released “within the next few days.”

“Everything will be revealed,” Trump said when he signed the order.

Experts who have combed countless documents on King are doubtful the pending release will provide any new insight on the death and life of King.

King’s family is demanding they see the papers before they are released.

Here is what we know:

When will we see them?

On April 10, during a Trump Cabinet meeting, Gabbard spoke of imminent release of the King and Robert F. Kennedy files.

“I’ve had over 100 people working around the clock to scan the papers,” Gabbard said. “These have been sitting in boxes in storage for decades — they have never been scanned or seen before.”

What are these documents?

In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing national security agencies to develop plans to release all government records relating to the assassinations of King and the Kennedy brothers.

In March, 64,000 documents about the assassination of President Kennedy were released.

Experts and historians who studied the documents say nothing was revealed to challenge known facts about Kennedy’s assassination, and that most of the material has been available through other sources for years.

Why does it matter?

Trump’s decision to declassify the documents fulfills a campaign promise to release the remaining files on King and the Kennedy brothers. But it also feeds into the American narrative involving conspiracies.

The 1960s were marked with political assassinations, including Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. All of them were clouded in conspiracy theories, buried under mountains of secret government files.

Trump himself has long promoted conspiracies, including those related to the assassinations. During his 2016 presidential run, he alleged that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, one of his Republican primary rivals, had been associated with JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” Trump said in the order. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”

King’s April 4, 1968, assassination has also been mired in controversy, particularly the role of assassin James Earl Ray, a small-time hood who was discharged from the U.S. Army for ineptitude. He was charged and convicted of King’s murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison.

In 1977, the Justice Department launched a task force to probe the FBI’s harassment and investigations of King, his assassination and the criminal investigation. It found that Ray acted alone.

That hasn’t stopped the conspiracy theories.

The King family never believed Ray acted alone. In a 1999 civil suit, a Memphis jury reached a unanimous verdict that King was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy involving the U.S. government.

“There is abundant evidence of a major, high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband,” Coretta Scott King said at the time.

What else is out there?

Complicating matters, citing “strong public interest in understanding the truth about the assassination,” the Justice Department recently moved to unseal FBI surveillance records of King — about two years before their court-ordered release.

Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed King was a Communist threat and illegally surveilled him in the 1960s. The files were ordered sealed in 1977 for 50 years, until Jan. 31, 2027.

The FBI surveillance material could include the contents of wiretaps, hidden microphones and transcripts of the civil rights icon, secretly recorded before his death. This could potentially involve unflattering and salacious details about King’s relationships with women.

The request was made over the objections of the King family and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which fears details of King’s private life will be used to tarnish his legacy.

The SCLC filed a motion to stop the release, arguing the 50-year time frame should remain in place and Trump “lacks the authority to compel the disclosure of any assassination records.”

David Garrow, who won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” said regarding the 2027 documents, both the government and the SCLC are being intentionally misleading.

“The administration, because it realizes full-well that these materials, which end in 1966, have nothing to do with Dr. King’s assassination and SCLC’s lawyers, because they wrongly assert that the surveillances were illegal at the time they occurred, which they were not,” Garrow said. The documents that are set to be released in 2027, cover a period between 1963 and 1968.

In 1963, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, stretching prior Justice Department policies dating back to the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, gave written authorization to bug King.

Jonathan Eig, the author of the 2024 Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography‚ “King: A Life,” said while he is in favor of transparency, the public’s right to know how King was treated by the FBI is more important than his personal behavior.

“I am concerned that the reason the government wants to release it ahead of schedule is so that they can continue this campaign to attack diversity and attack civil rights,” Eig said. “And if the reason they want to speed up the release of these tapes is in order to attack King and to undermine his role as an icon, as a hero, if the goal is to diminish King’s stature, then I think they’re doing it for the wrong reasons.”

In a written statement, Martin Luther King III said the potential early release of the 2027 files is part of an effort to discredit his father and “harm the civil rights cause that he championed.”

“We respectfully disagree that the public release of the sealed records is a benefit for our family," King III wrote.

“We also disagree that our family and the general public stand on equal footing, with respect to illicit recordings made of our family home. Private spaces by definition exclude the public; our family’s privacy deserves the same protection and respect as any other family in America.”

How does the family feel about it?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, is all for the full, and public release of his father’s files. But from the moment Trump announced the release of the files, the King family has opposed the plan.

Initially, they asked to review the records before they are made public. It is not clear if the Trump administration agreed to that accommodation.

The family released a statement objecting to the release after Trump signed his order in January.

“For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years,” the King family said in a statement in January.

“We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release.”

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