New York [US], July 22: The US Department of Justice has released more than 240,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of Martin Luther King on July 21, according to Reuters. The documents were posted on the website of the US National Archives and Records Administration.
The new files include documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which monitored Martin Luther King in an effort to discredit him.
Reverend Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his efforts to fight injustice and segregation in the United States. He was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, an assassination that shocked the United States in a year of widespread racial violence and anti-war protests. That same year, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, a former senator and attorney general and brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, was also assassinated.
James Earl Ray, a segregationist, admitted to killing King but later recanted. He died in prison in 1998.
King's family and others questioned whether Ray acted alone or whether someone else was the real killer. King's widow, Coretta Scott, asked for the investigation to be reopened. After a review in 1998, the US Justice Department concluded that "nothing could be found to undermine the 1969 judicial decision that James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King," according to CNN.
The FBI monitored and built a dossier on Mr. King in the 1950s and 1960s, including wiretapping, which the agency has acknowledged in recent years was evidence of abuse and overreach.
Mr. King's family alleges that he was the target of a relentless campaign of surveillance and disinformation by then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
"We must now honor his sacrifice by recommitting to realizing his dream - a society rooted in compassion, unity and equality," the King family said in a statement. They also called for the new records to be used with restraint, empathy and respect for the family's grief, and condemned the misuse of the records.
After taking office in January, President Donald Trump made good on his campaign promise to be open and transparent about assassinations, including the death of President Kennedy . This year, the administration released thousands of pages of records related to the Kennedy brothers' assassinations.
Source: Thanh Nien Newspaper