The late and great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a legendary figure in American history. Yet like many American icons, there is still so much to learn and unpack about him. 

Last week, the National Archives released government files tied to President John F. Kennedy's assassination, according to the Washington Post.

While these files contain information about Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK, they also contain documents related to the FBI's investigation MLK, specifically a negative analysis of the civil rights leader completed on March 12, 1968, just three weeks before King's assassination. 

The major allegation in the analysis is that MLK's political stance and his desire to create his civil rights organization were heavily influenced by the Communist Party USA.

Entitled “MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., A CURRENT ANALYSIS,” the document claims that King's adviser Stanley Levison, a lawyer and a businessman who previously served as a financier for the Communist Party before meeting King, had a strong influence over King's actions and speeches. 

In the document, King was described as “a whole-hearted Marxist who has studied [Marxism], believes in it and agrees with it, but because of his being a minister of religion, does not dare to espouse it publicly.”

However, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian David Garrow told the Post that these claims are lies! 

“The number one thing I’ve learned in 40 years of doing this, is just because you see it in a top-secret document, just because someone had said it to the FBI, doesn’t mean it’s all accurate,” Garrow noted.

As we know, the FBI spied on King to collect information on him throughout the 1960s. The new documents support theories that J. Edgar Hoover, who was FBI Director at the time, had a personal vendetta against King. Garrow notes that the Communist threat was greatly exaggerated.

“I think the number one takeaway historically is how, even in March of 1968, the FBI continues to be bizarrely preoccupied with how important the Communist Party USA is … the Communist Party, by 1968, is of no importance to anything,” said Garrow. “These incredibly exaggerated statements of communist influence are exactly what the FBI wants to hear.”

Garrow even confirmed that the FBI began wiretapping Levison, but found no ties to communism. In fact, Garrow's research found that King made a comment distancing himself from communism, and that though the FBI likely knew about the comment, it was left out of Hoover's briefings on the leader with President Lyndon B. Johnson. 

“There are things I wanted to say renouncing communism in theory, but they would not go along with it. We wanted to say that it was an alien philosophy contrary to us, but they wouldn’t go along with it,” King told Bayard Rustin in May 1965, according to Garrow.