US President Donald Trump’s administration has released a trove of records on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, including FBI surveillance files on the civil rights leader. <\/p>\n
A court-imposed order had kept the FBI documents, totalling 230,000 pages, blocked from public view since 1977. <\/p>\n
Many members of King’s family had opposed the release. A statement from his two living children condemned “any attempts to misuse these documents in ways intended to undermine our father’s legacy”.<\/p>\n
King, a Baptist minister, was shot in Memphis on 4 April 1968, at age 39. James Earl Ray, a career criminal, pleaded guilty to the killing, but later renounced his plea.<\/p>\n
King Jr’s two living children, Martin III and Bernice, who were notified ahead of time about the release, said in a statement on Monday: “We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.<\/p>\n
“The release of these files must be viewed within their full historical context.<\/p>\n
“During our father’s lifetime, he was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).” <\/p>\n
The statement said the government’s surveillance amounted to “invasions of privacy” and “intentional assaults on the truth” that denied King the “dignity and freedoms of private citizens”. <\/p>\n
On the campaign trail, Trump promised Americans he would release files on the assassination of King and former President John F Kennedy. <\/p>\n
He signed an executive order in January ordering that documents from both assassinations be declassified, along with the records in the assassination of Robert F Kennedy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US President Donald Trump’s administration has released a trove of records on the assassination of Martin Luther King…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-13906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}