Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of MLK Jr.

by Daniel J. Flynn of Academia.org

“Three death threats, one left hook to the jaw, 40 rejections 
from 40 publishers in 40 months, and a sold-out first edition.”

– Theodore Pappas

“Plagiarism and the Culture War is written with a sobriety that 
is essential to effectively discussing such sensitive topics as 
race and the shortcomings of a martyred hero. While 
hagiographers may shout ‘racism’ at any hint of imperfection 
attributed to the slain civil rights leader, Pappas’ courageous 
work assures that they can no longer continue this smokescreen 
with any legitimacy.”

– Campus Report



The Academic Cover-up of the King Plagiarism Story

Denizens of the campuses are fond of invoking the buzzword, 
“diversity.” The frequency and carelessness with which the term 
is used has obliterated any stable definition of this once 
seemingly benign word. For those unfamiliar with campus 
newspeak, the word “diversity” conjured up thoughts of variety 
and difference. When academics talk about diversity, however, 
the term is most often used as a euphemism for conformity.

At the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, an appreciation 
of diversity (o the academic variety) translates into a history 
department that houses 49 registered Democrats and one 
Republican. A fairly recent study gave Democrats a 22 to 2 among 
Stanford’s historians. The University of Colorado-Boulder is 
similarly inclined toward diversity, putting forth 27 history 
professors enrolled in the Democratic Party and zero in the GOP. 
Cornell and Dartmouth shout Republican history faculty members 
as well, with 29 and 10 Democrats, respectively.

This Alice-in-Wonderland concept of diversity often leads to the 
promotion of ideas of dubious scholarship. A “gay” Lincoln, 
Africans discovering the Americas, and special “women’s ways of 
knowing” are just a few ideas that are given much credence in 
higher education. While much of what is taught in America’s 
lecture halls is certainly disturbing, a more serious affront to 
legitimate scholarship is academia’s sins of omission. The level-
headed will always dismiss what is frivolous and included in the 
curriculum. What is sound and excluded will never even make it 
to the realm of debate.

One such omission is the painful work of Theodore Pappas 
unveiling Martin Luther King as an habitual plagiarist. As 
Pappas notes in Plagiarism and the Culture War, “No one suffers 
the pangs and arrows of outrageous fortune like the exposer of a 
famous plagiarist, for it is he, not the sinner and certainly 
not the sin, who becomes the center of debate, the target of 
abuse, and the victim of the hot and harsh lights of public 
scrutiny.”

And suffer Pappas has. Since exposing King as a plagiarist in 
1990, Pappas notes that he has received numerous threatening 
letters, “most of them postmarked from university towns.” He’s 
been the object of insult amongst King partisans (even to the 
point of being assaulted.) And Plagiarism and the Culture War 
was rejected by 40 publishing houses before being releases in 
July. As one publisher, explained, “I recommend against 
publishing this book, because such honesty and truth-telling 
could only be destructive.”

The evidence laid out by Pappas of King’s plagiarism is 
irrefutable. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Nobel Prize 
Lecture, and “I have a Dream” address before a crowd of 250,000 
in 1963 all contained significant portions taken from other 
sources. Pappas’ analyses of King’s Boston University theology 
dissertation, which takes up the bulk of the book, reveals 
dozens of passages stolen from the dissertation of Jack Boozer, 
and BU doctoral candidate who was awarded his Ph.D. in theology 
just a few years before king. One such passage reads,

“Correlation means the 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.

A reading of Boozer’s original paragraph shows a difference only 
of an insertion of hyphens between the words “logos” and 
“nature,” making any side-by-side comparison of the two passages 
a waste of space. More than half of King’s dissertation – like 
the aforementioned example – reads like a near copy of Boozer’s 
work.

The “conjoining of different sections of Boozer’s dissertation 
could not have been done without great circumspection and 
forethought,” notes Pappas, so “it gives lie to the notion that 
King somehow plagiarized unintentionally.” Pappas further 
discounts claims that King was unaware he had engaged in any 
wrongdoing by observing that he had spent seven years in post-
secondary education,  had taken a thesis-writing course, and had 
been warned by an advisor that his paper nearly quoted another 
work without attribution.

Many readers might wonder why King, an intelligent and capable 
man, would cheat his way to a Ph.D. Of more relevance is the 
question of why faculty let him do it. King’s doctoral advisor 
also played the same role with Jack Boozer. He approved Boozer’s 
paper in 1952 and just three years later stamped his imprimatur 
on King’s purloined dissertation.

Nearly four decades later, when confronted with the same chance 
to redeem itself in the wake of the plagiarism charges, BU chose 
to cover-up once again. Then acting BU President John Westling 
labeled the story “false,” claiming that the paper had “been 
scrupulously examined and reexamined by scholars,” resulting in 
the discovery of “Not a single instance of plagiarism.”

Clayborne Carson, editor of the federally-funded King Papers 
Project at Stanford University, chose obfuscation over truth as 
well. Carson sat on the information and denied early reports of 
the preacher’s intellectual theft despite knowing about it three 
years before the story broke. In early 1990, Carson told his 
underwriter, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Like 
him, the NEH didn’t think it necessary to disclose this 
inconvenient information to the American public.

When it became obvious that King did, in fact, regularly 
plagiarize, his academic cheerleaders chose to redefine 
plagiarism rather then reassess the Baptist preacher. For 
Arizona State University Professor Keith Miller, King’s 
unattributed use of other scholars’ work is “synthesizing,” 
“alchemizing,” “incorporations, “intertexulaizations,” 
everything but the “p” word. “How could such a compelling leader 
commit what most people define as a writer’s worst sin”? asked 
Miller. “The contradiction should prompt us to rethink our 
definition of plagiarism.”

While shameless intellectuals peddle baseless allegations about 
the marital fidelity of Dwight Eisenhower or spin tales of 
Thomas Jefferson begetting slave offspring, they consider it 
blasphemy to honestly assess the plagiarism of Martin Luther 
King. There are literally hundreds of books about King, yet one 
would be hard pressed to find even a handful that address the 
plagiarism question. With so much redundancy within this cottage 
industry of publishing, one would think that authors would jump 
at the chance to examine an unexplored facet of their subject’s 
life – not so!

It would be wrong to think “plagiarist” every time one reflects 
on the life of Martin Luther King. The Baptist minister led a 
movement which secured voting rights for millions of Americans 
deprived of suffrage and drastically reduced the amount of 
racial discrimination present in the United States. Questions of 
plagiary, adultery, and demagoguery (e.g., he labeled the 
philosophy of Barry Goldwater, “Hitlerism”), are secondary.

Plagiarism and the Culture War is written with a sobriety that 
is essential to effectively discussing such sensitive topics as 
race and the shortcomings of a martyred hero. While 
hagiographers may shout “racism” at any hint of imperfection 
attributed to the slain civil rights leader, Pappas’ courageous 
work assures that they can no longer continue this smokescreen 
with any legitimacy.

“Our immense debt to the man and our respect for his memory do 
not,” Pappas writes, “provide the slightest excuse for a 
political agenda that credits him with virtues that he did not 
have and successes that he did not achieve.”

Plagiarism and the Culture War uncovers what rational observers 
have known about Martin Luther King for decades: that the man 
canonized by the academic left was, merely a man. What it tells 
us about intellectuals more concerned with “diversity” than 
truth is far more revealing.

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