ATLANTA — The surviving children of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. are speaking out forcefully against the release of more than 240,000 pages of documents involving the assassination of their father, calling it an extension of a government campaign to discredit and distort his legacy.

In a joint statement issued Monday, Bernice King and her brother Martin Luther King III acknowledged the public’s long-standing interest in the files but urged Americans to approach them with care, context and compassion.

“We recognize that the release of documents concerning the assassination of our father, Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has long been a subject of interest, captivating public curiosity for decades,” they said. “As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief — a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met — an absence our family has endured for over 57 years.”

Despite those objections, the Trump administration on Monday released the nearly quarter-million pages of records through the National Archives and Records Administration.

The release was part of a January order by Trump to release the assassination files of King, as well as former President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Attorney General Pamela Bondi, joined at the release of the papers by Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King Jr., said the disclosure is the product of months of collaboration between several federal agencies including the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency, which spent hundreds of hours preparing and digitizing the documents for release.

“The American people deserve answers decades after the horrific assassination of one of our nation’s great leaders,” Bondi said in a statement.

Alveda King, a longtime Trump supporter, said she was grateful that the president released the documents, calling it a “historic step towards the truth that the American people deserve.”

But the civil rights leader’s children, along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — the organization he helped found — have strikingly different opinions and had urged the government not to proceed.

The trove, much of which had never been digitized, includes internal memos, wiretap transcripts, audio recordings and intelligence from the FBI, CIA and foreign agencies.

The documents — sealed by court order since 1977 — were compiled as part of the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO surveillance campaign and later transferred to the archives.

Their release follows years of legal and political pressure from transparency advocates, historians and conspiracy theorists, all seeking insight into the government’s extensive monitoring of King during the Civil Rights Movement.

As the public begins combing through the newly released material, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow is urging caution — tempering expectations that the records will contain any major revelations.

As of Monday afternoon, Garrow said he had reviewed about 20% of the files, much of it consisting of “1970s-era interagency traffic related to the Department of Justice’s investigations and the House Select Committee on Assassinations.”

“I do not expect anything newsworthy,” said Garrow, the author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”

Still, for the King family, the release isn’t just a matter of public record — it’s a reopening of personal wounds.

“I am honestly not prepared to revisit the gruesome details of this painful history,” King’s daughter Bernice King wrote in an essay for “Vanity Fair.” “For me, there is no real value in it. There is only reliving the trauma.”

The siblings also had expressed concerns that the release of any documents pertaining to their father was an intentional attempt to dredge up salacious FBI surveillance meant to discredit the civil rights icon.

Following a January executive order calling for the release of documents pertaining to high-profile political assassinations of the 1960s — and citing a “strong public interest in understanding the truth about the King assassination” — the Justice Department separately moved to unseal FBI surveillance records of King about two years before their scheduled court-ordered release.

A judge is still weighing that decision.

“We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief,” they wrote. “The release of these files must be viewed within their full historical context.”

That context, the King family said, involves decades of state-sponsored intrusion, harassment and sabotage.

“During our father’s lifetime, he was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the FBI,” they wrote. “The intent of the government’s COINTELPRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement.”

The King siblings, who were given advance notice of the release, assigned teams to begin reviewing the materials. They also reiterated their long-held belief that the U.S. government was involved in their father’s death.

In 1999, the family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in Shelby County, Tennessee. A jury unanimously concluded that King was the victim of a conspiracy involving Memphis cafe owner Loyd Jowers and unnamed coconspirators, including government agencies.

The verdict convinced the family that someone other than James Earl Ray was the shooter.

“Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame,” they wrote. “Our family views that verdict as an affirmation of our long-held beliefs. As we review these newly released files, we will assess whether they offer additional insights beyond the findings our family has already accepted.”

While supporting the principles of transparency and historical accountability, the family warned that the records could be misused to discredit King or diminish the Civil Rights Movement he led.

“We strongly condemn any attempts to misuse these documents in ways intended to undermine our father’s legacy and the significant achievements of the movement,” they wrote. “Those who promote the fruit of the FBI’s surveillance will unknowingly align themselves with an ongoing campaign to degrade our father and the Civil Rights Movement.”

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