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Plagiarism and The Culture War : The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Other Prominent Americans

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For the past eight years, intellectual sleuth Theodore Pappas, the former managing editor of Chronicles magazine, has hunted down prominent incidents of plagiarism, most notably those involving the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. His book operates on four levels: as a scholarly investigation into whether King plagiarized his 1955 Boston University doctoral dissertation; as an inquiry into the conduct of the guardians of the King legacy (Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson, the King family, et al.); as a study of the academic-publishing-media image complex that connived with the guardians to cover up the scandal; and as a brief history of plagiarism, from its 18th-century origins to its present status in an academic world lacking intellectual integrity.

Pappas emphasizes that Martin King, as the younger King was known, was a great and courageous, though flawed human being. However, in recent years an idolatrous movement has developed that has implicitly removed King from the ranks of the human.

Pappas shows that King's compulsive coveting of other men's words went back at least to his undergraduate days at Atlanta's Morehouse College, and continued at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University. "King's plagiarisms grow more sweeping with each year he progresses in higher education." Ultimately, King stole the most dramatic passages of his speech, "I Have a Dream," from an address by the Rev. Archibald Carey at the 1952 Republican Convention.

Pappas prints extensive parallel excerpts from King's student papers at Morehouse, on through his Boston University doctoral dissertation, and their sources. BU officials eventually admitted that King had pilfered one-third of his dissertation from Jack Stewart Boozer's 1952 Boston University dissertation. (Evidently, 1952 was a very good year!) But first the predominantly white, politically diverse Friends of Martin went on the offensive: They lied, denied, and sought to silence the whistleblowers.

From 1987-90, Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project, deliberately misled journalists. And instead of simply comparing the dissertations in his own school's library, Boston University President Jon Westling unquestioningly accepted Carson's claims, insisting in 1990 that "not a single instance of plagiarism of any sort has been identified."

Mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, New Republic, Washington Post, and Atlanta Journal/Constitution, sat on the story for a year, and only ran it after a mealy-mouthed report appeared in The Wall Street Journal, one year after the British Sunday Telegraph had told the entire story.

And then there is Keith Miller. A white composition instructor at Arizone State University, Miller espouses a theory of "voice merging," which holds that blacks cannot commit plagiarism, because the black oral tradition does not recognize intellectual property rights, and that King merely took the words of white men in order to make himself intelligible and acceptable to white audiences.

As Pappas points out, MLK believed in intellectual proerty rights; he had taken a course at BU devoted to plagiarism and scholarly standards; he copyrighted his plagiarized speeches; and Miller provides no evidence that King saw himself as part of the "tradition" that Miller has posited. There is no "voice merging" tradition; Keith Miller made it up, with its attendant revision of black American (and thus American) history, with the sole and explicit purpose of rescuing King's scholarly reputation.

Pappas suggests that the young King escaped apprehension due either to an early form of affirmative action or his professors' laziness and incompetence. And that was back in the good old days. As Thomas Sowell recently noted, the title "full professor" may need to be replaced with "empty professor."

After spending my first year teaching college buried in plagiarized term papers, I stopped assigning take-home papers. In seven years as an instructor, I have never heard of a student being disciplined for plagiarism (though I do know of instructors who were fired for attempting to discipline student-plagiarists). Many students fail to comprehend the very concept. They understand only that copying from influential authors without attribution brings "A"s from most instructors, while angering others. Today's colleges have in effect institutionalized a "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding plagiarism.

The great thing about Theodore Pappas' account is its transparent fair-mindedness. Pappas is interested solely in the ramifications of intellectual corruption; he isn't an apparatchik at all. Thus, his scrupulously documented account of MLK's (and other late-twentieth-century demigods') mania for literary theft can't be accused of ideological axe-grinding. He sets out the facts in the most sober manner possible. Moreover, his style is clear, trenchant and unassuming all at once.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a PLAGIARIST as Pappas thoroughly documents in this important work. That Pappas was one of the few within the academy to outright condemn King's blatant plagiarism points to the generally sorry condition of the American intellectual tradition on many campuses today.

Pappas reviews the history of this case of plagiarism by a venerated civil rights leader and concludes with a mention of the irony of it all, "the King estate now enforces copyrights and demands royalties on work which King often stole in the first place . . . [from] the scores of other writers, ministers, scholars, and social activists whose work fell prey to King's 'voice merging'."

Of course, voice merging is nothing new. Wordthievery has been going on for as long as anybody can remember since the good ole days of frat-house file sharing on up to the modern paper databases and online paper "editing" and "research services". What King did is really no different from what many others have done--he just got caught for it, as Pappas notes, when his papers were turned over to scholars for research purposes (bad idea!!!--for King's legacy, anyhow).

This book is worth every penny. It oughta be on every public library shelf across the country. But censorship, threats--including death threats--claims of racism (unfounded--Pappas fairly assesses King's plagiarism), and other techniques for distorting the truth will continue to muddy the waters for those wanting to find out about these plagiarism charges.

Why did such a scholar have such a difficult time finding a publisher? Why have there been such vocal opponents of this fair-minded scholar simply for writing the truth about Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr. ? Important questions that demand an answer.

A "brave book" indeed as Eugene Genovese notes in his forward. All the more so in the current stifling, censoring, intimidating, suffocating atmosphere created by the "complacency of the multicultural left". They hate this book! They don't want you to read this book!

Buy a copy, check it out from your local library (if it hasn't been removed by a misguided multicultural lefty), sit down, take a deep breath, and read this brave book. You'll be astonished, quite possibly outraged, and most certainly not disappointed. It's not about race at all. It's about more basic things such as intellectual honesty, cribbing, textual thievery, discipline-specific (theology in King's case) incompetency, and a cover-up sham perpetrated by members of academia whose knees knocked together for fear of revealing what they had discovered.

Dr. Herbert Ulysses Quickwit

A very honest and forthright book. Should be required reading in any course concerning Dr King.

Pappas' reasearch is very engaging. Yes King did steal his most famous essays and speechs and back his theory up with hard facts.

On reviewer on this cite insisted that King's doctoral thesis reads similar to Jack Boozer's but does not rise to plagiarism. As Pappas points out, when Boozer cites a quote from Tillich he mis-cites page 282 istead of page 252. An honest mistake. But King aslo cites page 282 rather than 252. Clearly the two did not mis-cite the quote by mere coincidence.

Pappas' only problem is that he does not use this book to break down King in whole. I'm still amazed that King and Jesus are the only two people honored with national holidays.

I too was brought up to admire King. However after researching his life I find nothing about it worth celebrating. In fact I find him as being the source of many of our race problems today. The book should have focused on debunking King in whole.

...

Theodore Pappas' book is a devastating look at the state of academia and "scholarship." The treatment of MLK, Jr's dissertation is especially troubling.

Theodore Pappas focused much of this book on the lies and chicanery of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his many apologists. There is little doubt but that the pseudoeducated civil rights leader did not earn his PhD. As matter of fact, he barely qualified for a mere bachelors degree. He simply lied and stole the work of other more brilliant individuals. King was also obviously way over his head when discussing the complicated issues of war and economics. Unfortunately, he conned the American people and proceeded to cause enormous harm. Adding insult to injury, the Revered King dared to copyright his thefts! The author is very cautious with his criticism. Mr. Pappas allows the evidence to speak for itself.

A few months after Theodore Pappas published this particular work, editor Clayborne Carson released The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.. These collections of essays by plagiarist King are shocking to say the least. Your jaw may drop to the ground. King unambiguously supported affirmative action, socialism, and was contemptuous toward America's attempt to protect the Vietnamese people from Communism. You should buy both books as soon as possible. They very well compliment each other.

The best book in stating the facts of deciet that were brought about during the "Civil Rights movement".
This controversial account analyzes the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent Americans, examining charges of plagiarism and problems of fraud and civil rights issues which have arisen from plagiarism issues.
Anyone studying social issues in general and King in particular will find this important supplemental reading.

I wish people really knew more about this book. They would realize Martin Luther King had an agenda to split the United States up, to help the Hollywood Communists continue their dividing the American public with smoke and mirrors. Jesse Jackson is one of their current greedy freinds.

Pappas argues that Martin Luther King Jr.'s plagiarism was aserious crime because it was ultimately the theft of thought (p 23). He gives seven examples from King's Ph.D. dissertation in which King copied, verbatim or nearly verbatim, passages from a previous student's (Jack Boozer's) dissertation (pp72-80):

1) On the subject of the Trinity; "It is a qualitative . . . characterization of God. It is an effort to express the richness of the divine life . . . It is the abysmal character of God, the element of power which is the basis of the Godhead, `which makes God God'."

2) On dualism; "Dualism is aware of the two poles of reality, but dualism conceives these in a static complementary relationship. Tillich maintains that they are related in a dynamic interaction, that one pole never exists out of relation to the other pole. One feels here again that . . . Tillich criticizes Hegel. For, according to Tillich, Hegel transcends the tension of existential involvement in the concept of a synthesis."

3) On God's manifestation in history; "In a real sense, then . . . god manifests himself in history. This manifestation is never complete because God as abyss is inexhaustible. But God as logos is manifest in history and is in real interdependence with man and man's logos."

4) On correlation; "Correlation means correspondence of data in the sense of a correspondence between religious symbols and that which is symbolized by them. It is upon the assumption of this correspondence that all utterances about God's nature are made. This correspondence is actual in the logos-nature of God and the logos-nature of man."

5) On symbol and sign; "A symbol possesses a necessary character. It cannot be exchanged. On the other hand a sign is impotent in itself and can be exchanged at will . . . The religious symbol is not the creation of a subjective desire or work. If the symbol loses its ontological grounding, it declines and becomes a mere `thing,' a sign impotent in itself. `Genuine symbols are not interchangeable at all and real symbols provide no objective knowledge, but yet a true awareness.' The criterion of a symbol is that through it the unconditioned is clearly grasped in its unconditionedness . . . Correlation as the correspondence of data means in this particular case that there is correspondence between religious symbols and that reality which these symbolize. Once a true religious symbol has been discovered one can be sure that here is an implicit indication of the nature of God."

6) On Tillich's conception of creation; "But tillich does not mean by creation an event which took place `once upon a time.' Creation does not describe an event, it rather indicates a condition, a relationship between God and the world. `It is the correlate to the analysis of man's finitude, it answers the question implied in man's finitude and in finitude generally.' Man asks a question which, in existence, he cannot answer."

7) On Tillich's monism; "But perhaps the most convincing statement of monism is in terms of love, that `man's love of God is the love with which God loves himself . . . The divine life is the divine self-love.' . . . Passages such as these certainly indicate an absolute monism. . . . There would be no history unless man were to some degree free; that is, to some degree independent from God. . . . He is to some extend `outside' the divine life. `To be outside the divine life means to stand in actualized freedom, in an existence which is no longer united with essence'."

If the great Alan Sokal (great as in this-man-should-win-a-Nobel-Prize great) had chosen to out the nonsense that passes for thought in Departments of Theology instead of Departments of Deconstructionism, the above passages could have been fitted neatly into his experimental submission to an appropriately prestigious theological journal. Pappas chose these quotes at random (p 71), so it is possible that the lack of thought expressed in them is a consequence of sampling error. Nevertheless, Pappas' case would have been more convincing if he had chosen examples that exemplified the charge that he made.