# Martin Luther King Jr. **Martin Luther King Jr.** (January 15, 1929, Atlanta – April 4, 1968, Memphis) was a Baptist minister and the first president of the [[Southern Christian Leadership Conference]]. He was the central figure of the nonviolent wing of the [[Civil Rights Movement]], and the campaigns he led helped end legal [[Segregation]] in the United States. For the KB he matters as the most documented target of FBI political surveillance, as the subject of the 1983 holiday fight, and as the figure the contemporary right most often quotes against his own causes. ## Montgomery to Memphis | Year | Milestone | |---|---| | 1955–56 | Pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church; elected to lead the [[Montgomery Bus Boycott]] | | 1957 | Co-founds the SCLC and becomes its first president (January) | | 1963 | Birmingham campaign and "Letter from Birmingham Jail"; [[I Have a Dream]] at the March on Washington, August 28 | | 1964 | [[Nobel Peace Prize]] at 35; [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] | | 1965 | [[Selma to Montgomery Marches]] lead to the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]] | | 1967 | "Beyond Vietnam" at Riverside Church, New York, April 4, breaking with the Johnson administration over the [[Vietnam War]] | | 1968 | Supports the Memphis sanitation strike while planning the Poor People's Campaign; shot dead April 4 at the Lorraine Motel | James Earl Ray was convicted of the killing. The King family has long argued he did not act alone, pointing to a 1999 Memphis civil jury verdict that found a conspiracy. ## The FBI campaign Under [[J. Edgar Hoover]] the FBI wiretapped King's home and SCLC offices from 1963 to 1968 and worked to discredit him, a campaign later exposed alongside [[COINTELPRO]] by the [[Church Committee]]. In late 1964, shortly after Hoover publicly called King "the most notorious liar in the country," the Bureau mailed him an anonymous letter, believed written by Assistant Director William Sullivan, calling him an "evil, abnormal beast" and widely read as urging suicide before the Nobel ceremony. Historian Beverly Gage published the unredacted text in 2014. In 1977 a federal court sealed the FBI's surveillance tapes and transcripts at the National Archives until January 31, 2027. ## The 2025 records fights Executive Order 14176 (January 23, 2025) covered King's assassination along with the Kennedys'. On July 21, 2025 the National Archives released more than 230,000 pages: FBI files from the assassination investigation, CIA records, and State Department records on Ray's extradition. Martin Luther King III and Bernice King warned against any effort to "weaponize" the files "to spread falsehoods." Critics called the timing a distraction from the [[Jeffrey Epstein]] files. The Justice Department also sought to unseal the 1977 surveillance records early over family and SCLC opposition; Judge Richard Leon heard arguments June 4, 2025 and denied early release December 4, 2025 (one source), leaving the January 2027 date intact. ## The holiday fight The House passed the King holiday 338–90 on August 2, 1983; after a [[Jesse Helms]] filibuster and a roughly 300-page dossier alleging communist ties, the Senate followed 78–22 on October 19. [[Ronald Reagan]] signed it on November 2, 1983, but had earlier written that the holiday rested on "an image, not reality." Asked about Helms's charges, he said, "We'll know in about thirty-five years, won't we," meaning the sealed FBI files. The first federal observance was January 20, 1986. ## The right's King Conservatives regularly quote one clause of the [[I Have a Dream]] speech, being judged "by the content of their character," against [[Affirmative Action]] and [[DEI]]. They leave out King's democratic-socialist economics, his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his critique of "the white moderate." [[Frederick Douglass]] gets the same treatment. A harder-edged faction rejects King outright. At Turning Point's AmericaFest in December 2023, [[Charlie Kirk]] called King "awful" and said passing the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] was "a huge mistake," and he later confirmed the remarks to Wired. ## See Also - [[Civil Rights Movement]] · [[Southern Christian Leadership Conference]] · [[Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]] · [[Montgomery Bus Boycott]] · [[Selma to Montgomery Marches]] - [[John Lewis]] · [[A. Philip Randolph]] · [[Bayard Rustin]] · [[COINTELPRO]] · [[J. Edgar Hoover]] · [[Vietnam War Timeline]] · [[Culture War]] · [[Desegregation]]