World

US President Trump releases Martin Luther King assassination files

The U.S. Justice Department on Monday released more than 240,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., including records from the FBI, which had surveilled the civil rights leader as part of an effort to discredit the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his civil rights movement.

Files were posted on the website of the National Archives, which said more would be released.

King died of an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, as he increasingly extended his attention from a nonviolent campaign for equal rights for African Americans to economic issues and calls for peace. His death shook the United States in a year that would also bring race riots, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump’s administration released thousands of pages of digital documents related to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and former President John F. Kennedy, who was killed in 1963.

Trump promised on the campaign trail to provide more transparency about Kennedy’s death. Upon taking office, he also ordered aides to present a plan for the release of records relating to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and King.

The FBI kept files on King in the 1950s and 1960s – even wiretapping his phones – because of what the bureau falsely said at the time were his suspected ties to communism during the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union. In recent years, the FBI has acknowledged that as an example of “abuse and overreach” in its history.

 

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