I was still processing the news that Donald Trump’s administration had just released more than 6,000 documents related to the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—and that they contained numerous references to my father, an undercover police officer who was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when the civil rights leader was killed, as well as a passing reference to a very young me. My 15-year-old son’s observation about a different but arguably related story gave me some clarity: “This whole thing has gone from conspiracy theory to actual conspiracy.”
He wasn’t the first to raise the issue regarding the scandal of the administration’s handling of files related to Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex trafficking operation and jailhouse death. Was the release of the Martin Luther King Jr. files meant to be a distraction from Trump’s promise to release the Epstein files, which he now claimed was old news? It certainly seemed that way. There was new reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi had informed Trump months earlier of his name’s appearance in these files, directly contradicting the president’s claims. My son’s remark reminded me of how easily fringe theories can give rise to real-world machinations and harm, and that the release of the King files was more than just a cynical attempt to distract from the brewing conflict among Trump’s supporters over Epstein. It continued a pattern of capitalizing on conspiracy theories for his ends, disregarding the broader ramifications and collateral damage. Recall his slur that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and that a Mexican-American judge couldn’t be fair to him, and of course, that the 2020 election was stolen. Conspiracies are at the heart of MAGA.
When it came to the Epstein files, the administration was in desperate need of a distraction. The president’s base was complaining that he was providing more obfuscation than clarity. Though Trump and key members of his administration had amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death and promised to release a trove of evidence regarding his sex trafficking of minors, including a client list of complicit elites, the Justice Department undermined those assurances in a July memo disclaiming the existence of any such client list and stating that it did not plan to release additional materials. Trump subsequently dismissed the Epstein file controversy as nothing more than a “hoax that’s perpetrated by the Democrats” to divert attention from his administration’s “tremendous achievement” with the economy and in Middle East affairs. He addressed the strife in stronger terms in a Truth Social post, condemning as “weaklings” those among the MAGA ranks he claimed had fallen for “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” Besides, as Trump asserted to reporters the same day, the Epstein story was “pretty boring stuff.”
Trump does not do boring. Creating spectacles is fundamental to his operational strategy, which is undoubtedly why he has compared himself favorably to infamous businessman-turned-showman-turned-politician P. T. Barnum. “We need P. T. Barnum, a little bit, because we have to build up the image of our country,” he told Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd in 2016. But Trump also uses his ringmaster skills to bolster and protect his own image, and a central element of his media circus has long been conspiracy theories. This is where the King files come in.
As with Trump’s use of other incendiary narratives over the years to bend public opinion to his advantage—from his newspaper ads calling for the executions of the Central Park Five to his racist birther rhetoric about Obama to his “stop the steal” claims regarding the 2020 presidential election—his reliance on the King files as a calculated diversion from his present difficulties not only threatens to distort our understanding of history and degrade public discourse but also to inflict harm on everyday lives. I should know, because my father has long been a central figure in conspiracy theories about King’s assassination and is mentioned multiple times in the documents.
The problem lies not merely in the disclosure of the more than 240,000 pages of material but in the blithely exploitative manner in which it was done. The idea that there should be more transparency around the government’s activities concerning King, particularly when it comes to his assassination, is uncontroversial. Many unanswered questions remain as to his murder, as underscored by the 1999 civil jury verdict finding that Memphis restaurateur Loyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators—including government agencies—conspired to assassinate King. Even the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, convened in 1976 to reinvestigate the murders of King and former President John F. Kennedy, found that there was likely a conspiracy to assassinate King (though that conspiracy was probably between James Earl Ray and his brothers).
And it is well documented that the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of illegal surveillance, psychological warfare, and more against individuals and groups deemed subversive specifically targeted King, going as far as to send him an anonymous letter urging him to end his own life. A 1963 memo circulated internally by the FBI’s head of domestic intelligence warned, “We must mark him now as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation.” So, it seems reasonable to press for a fuller disclosure of government activities concerning King.
His family has done that work for decades, not only in its pursuit of civil remedies but also in urging the Justice Department’s 1998 examination of additional evidence concerning the assassination. At the same time, they have recognized the dangers of amplifying records containing spurious information that could be used to smear King and disgrace his memory, which is why his surviving children opposed the release. “While we support transparency and historical accountability, we object to any attacks on our father’s legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods,” Martin Luther King III and Bernice A. King wrote in a statement issued after the documents were posted on the National Archives website.
When I got news of the release, my thoughts immediately went to the King family. Then they turned to my father, who found himself at the scene of the civil rights leader’s 1968 assassination on the balcony of Memphis’s Lorraine Motel. In the famous photograph taken moments after a sniper’s bullet struck King, Marrell McCollough knelt beside the slain civil rights leader and attempted to render first aid, holding a towel to his wounded jaw. The other people on the balcony knew McCollough as the Minister of Transportation for a Black activist group called the Invaders. But he was actually an undercover Memphis police officer who had infiltrated the Invaders and was reporting on their activities. Six years later, he began a career at the Central Intelligence Agency. He retired after 25 years of service, then worked ten more years as a contractor. It was after retiring from this work that he shared with me the previously unknown story of his life and work, filling in many blanks, not to mention historical puzzle pieces.
Given his presence at the scene of King’s murder, the nature of the work that placed him there, and his subsequent career, he has been a recurring topic in discussions about the assassination, especially when it comes to unverified claims about what happened. There was a time when seeing his name mentioned online filled me with a visceral dread because of the reckless claims people made about him. The last time I saw a discussion thread about him on X, some of the comments called for physical harm to him and worse. (The thread has since been deleted.) His story is much more than just a matter of history, and the way it is handled carries real-life implications.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that the newly released tranche of documents included detailed records about him. There is the glowing report of his 1973 job interview with a CIA recruiter, who gushes that my father is “a real man.” And there are the 1997 letters from the CIA’s director of congressional affairs forwarding a “background paper” about him to the chairmen of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense and the House Appropriations Subcommittee on National Security, as well as to staffers for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The paper summarizes a Time magazine article, titled “King Conspiracy Update,” about how “conspiracy theorists are focusing on Mr. McCollough as a participant in a US Government conspiracy to murder Dr. King.” Under the guidance of the CIA’s acting director, the agency’s public affairs staff advised the article’s author that “Mr. McCollough was not hired until six years after the assassination took place.”
The documents also include a 1998 note from an attorney in the agency’s Office of General Counsel regarding a grueling polygraph examination my father underwent during the Justice Department’s renewed investigation into the assassination. The attorney concludes the letter by observing, “In the final analysis, the DoJ attorney and I believe Merrell [sic] was not involved in a plot to assassinate Dr. King.”
The records also contain information of a more personal nature, like details about his character and family life. Remarks about him by a colleague and close friend leaped out at me—because I recognized the man as my godfather. He describes my mother, Peggy, as “a pretty girl… [who] had a good job as asst. producer for the old TV Panorama news show out of Washington.” Another line made me do a double-take: “They lived here in the Wash. area and there were two more children from that union.” The two children were my younger brother Micah and I. We were in the King files, too.
I doubt I have seen everything in the files that references us. Even with the aid of technology, going through more than 240,000 pages takes a lot of work, and I have much more reading to do. But I do not expect any big surprises. From what I have read, neither do leading King historians. As a student of the subject matter—not entirely by choice—I find the documents endlessly fascinating. Among other things, they may have the ironic effect of putting some of the conspiracy theories about my father to rest. All the same, I find their release no cause for celebration. Sharing documents like these without context or care risks warping our perceptions of history, eroding the integrity of public discourse, and damaging people’s lives, especially if it is done as a political distraction.
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