Overview

• Over 240,000 pages of FBI surveillance records on Martin Luther King Jr. were unsealed on July 21 after Justice Department attorneys persuaded a judge to lift a court-imposed seal due in 2027.
• The trove includes investigative leads, interviews with associates of assassin James Earl Ray and newly digitized foreign intelligence interactions from J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO campaign.
• Martin Luther King III, Bernice King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference urged readers to view the unredacted files with empathy and full historical context to avoid misusing private records.
• Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard hailed the disclosure as “unprecedented” and credited President Trump for accelerating the digitization and public access of the documents.
• Prominent activists such as the Rev. Al Sharpton labeled the disclosure a political ploy designed to distract from scrutiny of the administration’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein records.