MLK Files Release Renews Debate Over His Legacy

The enduring legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has long existed as a powerful, yet pliant, force in American public life.

Even during his early rise, political figures understood the potency of aligning with, or opposing, King’s moral authority. John F. Kennedy, for instance, gained political advantage during a tight 1960 presidential race by intervening on King’s behalf after an Atlanta arrest, forging crucial links with Black voters. Years later, Richard Nixon considered reaching out to King, but instead found political mileage in casting the civil rights leader as a rabble-rousing lawbreaker, solidifying Nixon’s “law and order” image.

The dynamic of selective engagement and strategic distortion cropped up once again this week with the Trump administration’s disclosure of documents from the National Archives related to King. The surprise release, at a time when the White House has been seeking to redirect attention from the Jeffrey Epstein controversy, reignited the longstanding debate over King’s contested narrative.

This disclosure, which brought few new revelations, was particularly anticipated by people who look for signs that King’s assassination was orchestrated, or that King himself was not the flawless moral figure he is often portrayed to be.

King’s daughter, Bernice King, observed in a statement after the files’ release that “a 1967 poll reflected that he was one of the most hated men in America.” She added that “many who quote him now and evoke him to deter justice today would likely hate, and may already hate, the authentic King.”

Those words point to a persistent truth, said Dr. John Kirk, a civil rights historian at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. King’s monumental impact was never static, he said. Instead, it became a malleable narrative, continually reshaped by political forces across the ideological spectrum to serve their divergent aims.

Speaking of the tranche of files released by President Donald J. Trump, Dr. Kirk added: “This is part of a long history of King and his legacy being used and abused. He hasn’t been here to shape his own memory. It’s been far easier for other people to appropriate and reappropriate his ideas and claim to speak on his behalf.”

On the right, the appropriation of King’s legacy often began with a subtle process of depoliticization, presenting him as universally revered, shearing him of his more revolutionary tenets. This sanitized appropriation stands in contrast to the extensive surveillance he endured from the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover, who once branded King as “enemy No. 1.”

The reframing commonly has hinged on selective interpretations of iconic King phrases from seminal moments in his public life. For example, in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” he defended civil disobedience against racist laws and rebutted moderate white members of the clergy who wanted him to be patient and stop protesting. But portions of the letter are used by some conservatives to defend strengthening law-and-order policies or to support people who resist government rules like vaccine mandates.

Selective quoting has also served a strategic aim: to dismantle the very progressive measures King ardently pursued. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, and the activist Christopher Rufo have invoked King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — quoting his hope that children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” — to argue against race-conscious policies.

Such interpretations, Dr. Kirk noted, “distort the way King thought about race.” He said King believed that race should “be confronted in American life as a way of moving beyond it,” not “just simply forgetting about race.”

The pattern of adapting King’s public image gained a considerable foothold with President Ronald Reagan’s establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday. Despite his long-held skepticism of King, Reagan signed the holiday law under public pressure at a time when his approval rating among moderate voters was declining.

The move made direct opposition to King increasingly difficult for conservatives, leading to an effort to “take their King and change him into something that he really wasn’t, to try and make him more palatable to the right,” said Jeanne Theoharis, a professor at Brooklyn College and author of the biography, “King of the North.”

For some Democrats, the legacy of King has become “ossified in history,” transforming him into a “saintly figure who has now been deified,” Dr. Kirk observed, adding that this idealization could potentially diminish King’s relevance.

The progressive left’s engagement with King’s legacy may also brush over the nuances of King’s life and message. Some people on the left may view King as too moderate for today’s challenges, reflecting a desire for a more confrontational approach to systemic issues. Others may diminish his moderation and put to the fore his later, more radical positions, like his criticism of the Vietnam War and his demand for a “revolution of values” to overcome what he termed the “giant triplets” of “racism, extreme materialism and militarism.”

The selective interpretation of King’s message is hardly a new phenomenon; it occurred even into his own lifetime. But the easy-to-digest version of King lacks the urgency and fight he demanded. King believed that “injustice is comfortable,” Dr. Theoharis explained, adding that “therefore, real change often required making people deeply uncomfortable, challenging their norms, their pocketbooks, and their complacency.”

“There is this sense of wanting to put ourselves next to King, without having to do the work that he and many of the people he organized would require of us,” Dr. Theoharis said. “So, we drape ourselves in the dead King.”

She described how powerful figures, even those who welcomed and glad-handed King publicly to further their political aims, would distance themselves when he pushed for actual structural change.

The release of documents from the National Archives is unlikely to exert a profound impact on how the public perceives him, Dr. Kirk said, adding that it was just another example of using King’s legacy as a political piñata.

King was not merely an idealist with a dream or the flag-bearer of nonviolent resistance. He was a champion of economic justice, an ardent anti-militarist and a tireless advocate for systemic transformation that confronted racism, poverty and war. He was willing to challenge comfortable orthodoxies and endure personal hardship.

The question, perhaps, is what would happen to the country’s politics if partisans on all sides grappled with the complexities of King’s entire person, rather than just the convenient fragments of his legacy.