On March 28, 1968, I celebrated my fifth birthday. Unbeknownst to me, it would be the last time I would celebrate my birthday with my father. Seven days later, on April 4, Daddy was assassinated. For years I tried to figure out: What did my father do? Why did they assassinate him?
As a five-year-old, I reasoned that Daddy was a good person who loved everybody and whom everybody loved; why would anyone want to kill him? People who stood up for “the least of these,” I reasoned, were not supposed to be killed. I know now that waging a nonviolent fight for justice is dangerous work.
As my siblings and I grew up without a father, we were often reminded that he was assassinated while seeking to make the world a better place. And there were more assassination attempts to come. These were assassination attempts on his reputational character. Our mother, Coretta Scott King, prepared us for these repeated attempts, saying, “They keep trying to assassinate your father over and over again.” At times, public discourse about my father slithered into slander to undermine the importance and impact of his legacy, and I learned to brace myself for the attempted assassinations by keeping my mother’s words close to my heart.
By the time we matured into adulthood, we had developed the composure necessary to stand before the nation and the world each April 4. Laying a wreath on Daddy’s crypt reminded us of what can happen when the forces of hate and injustice have no bounds.
We watched my mother’s example as she continued his work. My siblings and I accepted our roles to advance our dad’s work in our own ways. Today, I am not writing in my role as CEO of The King Center to address the government’s recent release of assassination records. Today, instead, I wonder why I have to be confronted once again with something that was very confusing and distressing for me as a five-year-old. I am, honestly, not prepared to revisit the gruesome details of this painful history. For me, there is no real value in it; there is only reliving the trauma.
This past January, three days after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, which coincided with the inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order to declassify records associated with my father’s assassination, along with those corresponding to the killings of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy. “That’s a big one,” the president said of the directive. “Everything will be revealed.”
The assassination of my father was investigated by the FBI in 1968; by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s; and then once again by the DOJ in the 1990s. The final investigation occurred during a wrongful death lawsuit brought by my family in civil court in 1999.
Two years earlier, my late brother, Dexter, had visited James Earl Ray in prison and looked into his eyes to ask him if he had killed our father. Ray responded, “No.” Despite the official narrative that the FBI and its then director, J. Edgar Hoover, crafted about Ray’s role as the sole assassin, our family believes that Ray was not the assassin but a scapegoat used by a large and powerful network, one that included informants whom the FBI recruited from within my father’s camp.
Much of this was corroborated in the courtroom in 1999. After hearing from some 70 witnesses over the course of four weeks during the wrongful death trial, a Memphis jury concluded that government entities conspired in the assassination. Our family views that verdict as an affirmation of our long-held beliefs.
My family needed to know the truth about who assassinated Daddy. The civil trial provided answers and began to help me answer my childhood question: Why? According to then FBI assistant director William Sullivan, my father was “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”
I believe the 1962 launch of Operation Breadbasket (a strategic, multifaceted effort to end economic discrimination), along with my father’s ability to captivate the imaginations of more than 250,000 Americans at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, heightened the government’s determination to assassinate his character through the covert, and now infamous, FBI counterintelligence program COINTELPRO.
This determination was further intensified by his public opposition to the Vietnam War, which he resoundingly conveyed in his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Delivered on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated, the speech included Daddy’s admonishment that the United States government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” When the government’s attempt at character assassination failed, another option prevailed: He was ultimately assassinated.
