The Trump administration has released records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr, despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination.
The release involves an estimated 200,000 pages of records that had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
King’s family, including his two living children, Martin III and Bernice, were given advance notice of the release and had their own teams reviewing the records in advance of the public disclosure.
Donald Trump promised as a candidate to release files related to John F Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. When the US president took office in January, he signed an executive order to declassify the JFK records, along with those associated with Robert F Kennedy’s and King’s 1968 assassinations.
The government unsealed the JFK records in March and disclosed some RFK files in April.
