Over the objections of most of the surviving family of Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI released 230,000 pages on their investigation into his assassination 57 years ago, on April 8, 1968.
The surviving members of the King family released a statement on Monday. King’s two living children, Martin III, 67, and Bernice, 62, opposed the release, citing the family's "personal grief."
“As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief — a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met -- an absence our family has endured for over 57 years,” they wrote in a statement released on Monday. “We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.”
“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,” the siblings said.
The FBI's campaign to discredit King while he was alive was unprecedented. King's children wanted the public to keep that context in mind when reading the documents.
“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,” the King children said in their statement.
“The intent ... was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,” they continued. “These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth — undermining the dignity and freedoms of private citizens who fought for justice, designed to neutralize those who dared to challenge the status quo.”
What the King children fail to mention is that the U.S. was at war with international communism at the time and that American communists, beholden to the Soviet Union, had infiltrated the Civil Rights Movement (sometimes with King's knowledge), seeking to use civil rights as a weapon to bring down the American government.
Hoover was paranoid about communism, but in this case, he was justified in his concerns. Still, the level of surveillance went far beyond anything relating to national security and bordered on a pathological obsession with "exposing" King as a womanizer.
Those who criticize King for hobnobbing with communists fail to note that King hated communism for its atheism and the oppressive nature of the ideology. He used communists to achieve his ends, never agreeing with them or their methods.
He was a complicated man. His children fear that people will cherry-pick evidence to buttress whatever case they're trying to make about King's personality and personal peccadillos, which will only obscure the real man.
In the internet age, this is inevitable.
King family members and others have long questioned whether [James Earl] Ray acted alone, or if he was even involved. Coretta Scott King asked for the probe to be reopened, and in 1998, then-Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a new look. Reno’s Justice Department said it “found nothing to disturb the 1969 judicial determination that James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King.”
In their latest statement, Bernice King and Martin Luther King III repeated their assertions that Ray was set up. They pointed to a 1999 civil case, brought by the King family, in which a Memphis jury concluded that Martin Luther King Jr. had been the target of a conspiracy.
“As we review these newly released files,” the Kings said, “we will assess whether they offer additional insights beyond the findings our family has already accepted.”
It's unlikely that researchers would find a game-changing piece of evidence in the MLK assassination narrative. Still, there are tantalizing hints about a group of southern businessmen promising to pay James Earl Ray to kill King, only to reneg on the deal after the fact. Ray himself recanted his confession, claiming he was in cahoots with a mysterious man named "Raoul." The FBI and other investigations determined that "Raoul" was made up by Ray.
Why do the conspiracy theories persist? William Manchester, author of "Death of a President," has the best explanation for why we need to believe in conspiracies.
“If you put the murder of the president of the United States at one end of the scale, and you put that waif Oswald on the other end, it just doesn’t balance," he wrote. "And you want to put something on Oswald’s side to make it balance. A conspiracy would do that beautifully. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever of that.”
That's not exactly right. There is evidence of a conspiracy, just no "conclusive evidence." Manchester points to this very human need for great events needing great explanations. In the case of the King assassination, that surely holds.
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