FBI files suggest MLK was more complicated than his myth

IN 1991 OLIVER STONE released a terrible film about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, filled with conspiracy theories about government involvement. Despite, or rather because of, its awfulness the film contributed to the passage of the snappily named President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The law compelled anything related to the assassination to be released 25 years after its passage, a date which fell in October 2017.

The definition of relevance was broad, which meant that a large collection of FBI records from the 1960s was made public, if only you knew where to look for them. David Garrow, a historian who has published a Pulitzer-winning biography of Martin Luther King, “Bearing the Cross”, as well as a book about King and the FBI, did know where to look. Last summer he spent two months going through new documents, including summaries of transcripts from the FBI’s Stasi-like surveillance of King’s private life.