New MLK assassination files spark controversy and questions

The U.S. Justice Department, under the direction of President Donald Trump, released more than 230,000 pages of previously sealed FBI and CIA documents concerning the MLK Assassination Files on July 21. King was killed on April 4, 1968, in Memphis.

The documents—dating from COINTELPRO-era surveillance through subsequent investigations—include memos, wiretap logs, and interviews that shed new light on the federal government’s extensive monitoring of King under infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The newly released MLK Assassination Files—dating from COINTELPRO-era surveillance through subsequent investigations—include memos, wiretap logs, and interviews that shed new light on the federal government’s extensive monitoring of King under infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover created COINTELPRO, a covert FBI program from 1956 to 1971 that targeted civil rights groups, Black activists, and other organizations considered “subversive” through surveillance and disruption. The operation ended after activists exposed it by leaking documents to the press.

Federal agents, informants, spies, and a coalition from various U.S. and global intelligence networks spied on King; Malcolm X; Medgar Evers; Marcus Garvey; Booker T. Washington; W.E.B. Du Bois; Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture); the entire Black Panther Party; African American clergy; publishers; business owners; writers; entertainers; athletes; and others whom they believed posed a “threat” to domestic or international interests.

The FBI’s Ghetto Informant Program, launched in 1967, consisted of more than 7,000 mid- to low-level, paid informants across Black America, including barbers, beauticians, waiters, maids, pastors, taxicab drivers, teachers, and others, according to declassified records. Informants attended meetings, recorded conversations, spread disinformation, and helped sow internal divisions; create and spread false rumors; instigate violence or criminal activity; or set up targets for arrest or death.

COINTELPRO sought to “prevent the rise of a Black Messiah” and at times replace authentic African American leadership and organizations with government-controlled and financed imposters. Among those targeted were the most charismatic, focused, and effective voices in Black protest, such as Evers, Malcolm X, King, Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton, and Peoria, Illinois, Panther Mark Clark—all of whom were assassinated as part of orchestrated conspiracies, according to court filings, historical records, government reports, and statements by eyewitnesses, survivors, and relatives. Leaders, staff, funders, supporters, and volunteers in their respective organizations were also targeted.

Over the course of three weeks beginning in March 1968, King, 39, had been diverted to Memphis to support a labor strike by Black sanitation workers while he was organizing what was to be the largest mass demonstration against poverty in the nation’s capital.

The Poor People’s Campaign aimed to address systemic poverty and would call for the federal government to guarantee a living wage; access to jobs and vocational training; a guaranteed annual income; access to affordable housing; health care as a basic human right; and greater investment in education and anti-poverty programs rather than war and the growing U.S. military-industrial complex.

Rev. King was killed in front of several aides and witnesses while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, preparing to go to dinner at the home of Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles. Marrell “Mac” McCollough—the Black man famously seen kneeling beside King’s body, tending to his wound and posing as a local youth leader—was later revealed to have ties to the intelligence community. While he was publicly identified as a Memphis undercover police officer immediately after the assassination, the CIA connection became clear over time. In April 1997, Time magazine reported that McCollough “has in fact been a CIA agent since at least 1974,” although he denied being on CIA payroll at the time of King’s death. In 2023, his daughter Leta McCollough Seletzky wrote the memoir The Kneeling Man, detailing his role in the MLK assassination and his career.

James Earl Ray, an escaped convict with racist ties, was convicted in 1969 of killing King and sentenced to 99 years. However, 72 hours after making an Alford plea—a type of plea in which a defendant maintains innocence but acknowledges that prosecutors have enough evidence to likely secure a conviction—the accused assassin recanted his confession, claiming he was pressured into pleading guilty by his attorney, Percy Foreman, and that he had been a pawn in a larger conspiracy. He died in 1998 at the age of 70.

The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, was not the first group to use the moniker or feline symbol. A year earlier, civil rights organizer Stokely Carmichael helped create the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, and it was known locally as the Black Panther Party.

The LCFO focused on voter registration and political power for Black residents under Jim Crow, using a black panther as part of its logo. Inspired by the group’s work, California college students Newton and Seale formed their own version in Oakland with a more militant mission—emphasizing armed self-defense, police patrols, and revolutionary change. Following King’s assassination, Stokely became a leader of the newer Black Panthers, but after COINTELPRO interference endangered his life, he fled to Africa and changed his name.

Ture also played a key role as co-founder and national leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In the 1970s, after embracing Pan-Africanism and Marxism, he worked to expand the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party—established by Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah, and Guinea’s President, Ahmed Sékou Touré—by launching chapters on college campuses across the United States and throughout the Caribbean. Ture’s influence continued for decades, but he passed away from prostate cancer on November 15, 1998, in Conakry, Guinea. Before his death, he alleged that his illness “was given to me by forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them,” even accusing the FBI of deliberately infecting him as part of an assassination plot.

Before changing his name, Ture coined the term “Black Power” during a voter registration rally in Mississippi and served as the ideological inspiration for African American militancy, which gave birth to the 15-year Black Power Movement.

Hampton was a 21-year-old strategist, expectant father, and chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. He began being surveilled as a 14-year-old after he led thousands of young people to integrate swimming pools in Maywood, Illinois, and to resist police brutality on the West Side of Chicago. A gifted orator, he served as president of the West Suburban NAACP Youth Council before being recruited to the newly formed Chicago-based chapter. With aspirations of being an attorney, the prolific leader coined the term “Rainbow Coalition” after successfully organizing street gangs from various Chicago neighborhoods into a united social justice front.

Hampton also developed hunger, social service, and health care programs that were adopted nationally by other Panther chapters across the country. The Free Breakfast Program for public school children and the creation of fully funded community-centric health clinics were later adopted by the U.S. government. He was murdered on December 4, 1969, in a conspiracy involving the FBI, Cook County State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan, the Chicago Police Department, and city officials. His assassination, which also took the life of 22-year-old Mark Clark, was facilitated by COINTELPRO infiltrators, including William O’Neal, who drugged the human rights leader, rendering him unconscious, and provided police with a blueprint to his bedroom. Unarmed, he was killed in his sleep, with his pregnant fiancée lying next to him.

O’Neal later entered the Federal Witness Protection Program in 1973. In 1989, he resurfaced in Chicago and was interviewed for Eyes on the Prize II. On the night the documentary aired—Jan. 15, 1990—he ran onto the Eisenhower Expressway and was killed, with officials ruling his death a suicide.

Trump’s release of the King files has revived interest in the people and issues of that era. While historians and researchers welcomed increased access to source material, King family members cautioned the public to view the records with empathy and historical sensitivity. Others accused the DOJ and the Trump administration of attempting to distract from several issues that some believe threaten U.S. democracy.

Rev. Bernice King, one of MLK’s two surviving children, urged the Trump administration to go further: “Now, do the Epstein files,” she wrote on X, underscoring the public demand for accountability amid overlapping controversies.

“I believe the 1962 launch of Operation Breadbasket (a strategic, multifaceted effort to end economic discrimination), along with my father’s ability to captivate the imaginations of more than 250,000 Americans at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, heightened the government’s determination to assassinate his character through the covert, and now infamous, FBI counterintelligence program COINTELPRO,” King said in Vanity Fair the day of the release.

In 1999, the family of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. filed a civil wrongful death lawsuit against Loyd Jowers, a Memphis restaurant owner who claimed he had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate King. The case, Coretta Scott King, et al. v. Loyd Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators, was not about seeking monetary damages but rather about uncovering the truth behind the assassination.

Tried in Memphis, the case concluded on Dec. 8, 1999, after a one-month trial. The jury—composed of six Black and six white jurors—unanimously found that Jowers was part of a conspiracy to kill King and that government agencies were implicated in the assassination, including elements of the Memphis Police Department, FBI, and possibly the U.S. military.

“…Despite the official narrative that the FBI and its then director, J. Edgar Hoover, crafted about Ray’s role as the sole assassin, our family believes that Ray was not the assassin, but a scapegoat used by a large and powerful network, one that included informants whom the FBI recruited from within my father’s camp,” Bernice King wrote in Vanity Fair.

Critics contend that invoking the MLK files allows the White House to frame the move as a transparency initiative while deflecting attention from ongoing questions about the Epstein probe and broader credibility issues. With the administration under fire, voices across the political spectrum are asking whether the move serves historical understanding—or political expediency.

Civil rights leaders offered pointed criticism. Rev. Al Sharpton, head of the National Action Network in New York, lambasted the move as politically motivated rather than truth-seeking. “Trump releasing the MLK assassination files is not about transparency or justice,” Sharpton said. “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.”

The timing has drawn significant scrutiny as Trump faces intense pressure over the handling of sensitive Jeffrey Epstein documents—including grand jury transcripts and alleged client lists. The declassification has been portrayed by some as a strategic diversion.

While it remains to be seen what the motives of the release were, one leader, who asked not to be identified, saw the timing as a way to remind Americans about King’s unfinished work and the continued attacks on voting rights.

“This is an opportunity to talk about the issues impacting Black people across the nation, and oppressed people worldwide,” the source told the Crusader.

“We’ve never addressed the rampant poverty in this country—and that, and the Vietnam War, were the last issues he addressed before he was murdered,” the activist said. “In many ways, our people are worse off. (MLK) feared he was leading people into a ‘burning house.’ He was a man of vision—and he was correct. Democracy is on fire.

“While all of these distractions are going on in the U.S., we have Palestinians—mostly civilians, women, and children—being bombed out of existence. You’re absolutely right, if Martin were here, he’d refocus our attention on the issues and not the personalities. The house is on fire.”