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The FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King, including the use of COINTELPRO tactics to discredit him.
The FBI files portray Martin Luther King Jr. as a serial adulterer and catalogue a range of sexual allegations — from numerous affairs to salacious episodes recorded in hotel rooms — based on the Bure...
’s 2019 essay reviving allegations from files about provoked a sharp divide: some commentators and Garrow himself argue the newly released documents force historians to reassess King’s personal conduc...
The archived memos and later reporting by contain explicit allegations that participated in group sex events described as “,” including a February 1968 workshop and a January 1964 , encounter, and cla...
New reporting and declassified files document that Martin Luther King Jr. engaged in extramarital sexual relationships and that the FBI collected and publicized material about those relationships as p...
— roughly 230,000–240,000 pages — was declassified and posted in 2025 after ’s directed the release of assassination files, and the release was coordinated by the , DNI, , and . The newly available ma...
The core portion of the ’s surveillance materials on —including audio wiretap recordings, transcripts of those recordings and related FBI surveillance documents—were placed under a federal sealing ord...
New revelations about Martin Luther King Jr.’s private life—chiefly drawn from FBI surveillance files and the research of biographers such as David Garrow—have intensified debate over documented sexua...
A January 23, 2025 executive order directed wide tied to the , and (MLK), and on July 21, 2025 the , in coordination with , , and , published a large tranche of MLK-related records—more than 230,000 p...
’s 2019 essay mining newly released files to make explosive allegations about provoked a sharp split among historians: many condemned his treatment of heavily tainted FBI material as credulous and irr...
Martin Luther King Jr. scholars treat FBI files as indispensable but compromised primary sources: they reveal extensive surveillance and a “rich human story,” yet must be read skeptically because the ...
David Garrow’s recent excavations of FBI files foreground explicit allegations of dozens of extramarital encounters and an especially explosive charge about King’s presence at a 1964 sexual assault, p...