"Dr." Martin Luther King, Jr. exposed as a fraud!

Excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr. (& L.H De Wolff)

Allegations: Plagiarism in college and graduate school papers, 
including his doctoral dissertation on "A Comparison of the 
Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry 
Nelson Wieman"; Verbatim thefts also discovered in political 
speeches including the famous "I Have a Dream" speech (see 
Pappas' Plagiarism and the Culture War, Hallberg revised and 
expanded version, p. 133)

...

It was the British press which first broke the news with regard 
to King's plagiarism, an indication of just how sensitive an 
issue this was for American newspapers. An article in the 
December 3rd (1989) edition of the Sunday Telegraph by Frank 
Johnson asked, "Martin Luther King--Was He a Plagiarist?"

But it was not until November 9, 1990 that a major U.S. media 
outlet released the story on King's plagiarism--even though this 
story had been known for over a year in the newsrooms of major 
newspapers. In the U.S., The Wall Street Journal was the first 
to go public with a front page article entitled, "To Their 
Dismay, King Scholars Find a Troubling Pattern--Civil Rights 
Leader was Lax in Attributing Some Parts of His Academic Papers".

This story was definitely a hot potato--too hot to handle for 
the same institutions which had "lionized" and deified a mere 
mortal.

The response of academia was particularly appalling:

"They lied, they told half-truths, they made up fables, they did 
everything they could but address facts. In the face of their 
own university's rules against plagiarism, Boston University's 
academic authorities and professors somehow found excuses for 
King's plagiarism. They found extenuating circumstances . . . 
they compromised their own university's integrity . . . [and] 
called into question the very standing of the university as a 
place where cheating is penalized and misrepresentation 
condemned" (Jacob Neusner, in the Foreward to Theodore Pappas' 
The Martin Luther King, Jr., Plagiarism Story).

There were scores of responses written after these discoveries 
of verbatim theft by King, basically in defense of plagiarism. 
As Neusner notes, "To defend King's plagiarism, plagiarism finds 
itself cleaned up and made a virtue of blacks". Authors such as 
Keith Miller used the black preaching tradition and "oral 
culture" as an excuse for King's somehow having been held to a 
lower academic standard than what might have been expected of 
whites at a place such as Boston University in the 1950s.

Critics such as Barry Gross delivered a scathing indictment of 
the scholarly incompetence at Boston University which led to 
King's receiving a PhD awarded for a dissertation containing 
extensive amounts of plagiarism. Compounding the incompetence, 
the plagiarism in King's dissertation on "A Comparison of the 
Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry 
Nelson Wieman" was from another theology student (Jack Boozer) 
who had had the same advisor as King just three years 
previously, namely Professor L. Harald De Wolff.

Gross delivers some pretty damning speculations as to why De 
Wolff never noticed or responded to King's plagiarism of Boozer:

"So how did King's plagiarism get by? Well, there are three 
possibilities: Professor De Wolff neglected to read either or 
both theses, in which case he was incompetent, or Professor De 
Wolff read them both and failed to notice the plagiarism, in 
which case, also, he was incompetent, or Professor De Wolff 
noticed the plagiarism but did not think it serious enough to 
mention, in which case, too, he was incompetent. There is a 
fourth hypothesis that is possibly even more damning: that 
Professor De Wolff noticed the plagiarism but did not think it 
mattered for a black man destined to be a preacher to be held to 
a rigorous scholarly standard" (From Gross's review of The 
Martin Luther King, Jr. Plagiarism Story).

The final hypothesis mentioned by Gross seems to be quite 
plausible since Theodore Pappas alludes in his work to rumours 
suggesting that King had, in fact, been advised by his 
dissertation committee to cite his sources according to academic 
convention. Quite unfortunately, he did not do this, and his 
dissertation committee never followed up to see if their advice 
had been heeded, if, in fact, such advice had ever been given.

Shortly after the stonewalling and coverup attempted by those 
overseeing the King Papers Project (Clayborne Carson of Stanford 
University, and Ralph Luker of Emory University), two important 
books were published by Theodore Pappas: The Martin Luther King, 
Jr. Plagiarism Story and Plagiarism and the Culture War. In the 
years since the discovery of King's plagiaries, a number of 
other excellent research projects have resulted in dissertations 
and reports on different aspects of the plagiaries of Martin 
Luther King, Jr.

What this ongoing research seems to most clearly portray is not 
just the shortcomings of Martin Luther King, Jr. himself, but 
the failures of academia in confronting intellectual fraud and 
in holding scholars to high standards of academic integrity 
whatever their racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds.

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All the more reason to question: Martin Luther King Day?
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