How Martin Luther King, Jr. Got Away With Plagiarism: Different Strokes for Different Folks.

This is perhaps the most outrageously hypocritical incident in 
the history of American higher education: how Boston University 
allowed Martin Luther King, Jr., to retain his doctorate 
posthumously. This was reverse racism: "We white folks know that 
Darkies have different standards."

(As a Christian Reconstructionist, I believe that God's law and 
moral standards aplly to everyone, across the board. As the son 
of one of the four Los Angeles-based FBI agents -- Ahern, 
Benjamin, Moorehead, and North -- who identified James Earl Ray 
as King's assassin, I was taught that everyone deserves the 
protection of the law. My father had no use for King's politics, 
but he was proud of his work on that world-famous case.)

Martin Luther King was born Michael King.

http://www.dclibrary.org/mlk/mlk-about.html
He never did have his name legally changed. He took his father's 
name.

He received his Ph.D. from Boston University, where he 
plagiarized his doctoral dissertation. He also plagiarized 
sections of Stride Toward Freedom. This was his practice 
throughout his academic career. He regarded other men's words 
just as he regarded other men's wives: as ripe for the taking.

His plagiarism has been known for a decade. It is discussed in 
detail by Theodore Pappas, who wrote a book about it: The Martin 
Luther King, Jr., Plagiarism Story (Rockford, Illinois: Rockford 
Institute, 1994).

http://contra-mundum.org/cm/reviews/tw_plagiarism.pdf
Pappas has published examples of this in the book he edited, 
Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther 
King and Other Prominent Americans. (Halberg, 1998).

http://www.cycad.com/cgi-
bin/pinc/apr2000/books/gt_plagiarism.html
http://www.academia.org/store/plagiarism_culture_war.html
The earliest warning that King was a plagiarist came from Ira 
Zepp, in an unpublished story, which revealed that sections of 
King's book, Stride Towqard Freedom, had been lifted from books 
written by two theologians.

His plagiarism includes his Nobel Prize lecture, his "I have a 
Dream" speech, and his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." One 
biographer called this activity "ghostwriting." (Note: authors 
pay ghostwriters for their work. King did not pay anyone for the 
purloined sections.) A chronology of the story of his plagiarism 
appears here:

http://chem-gharbison.unl.edu/mlk/chronology.html
[2005 Note: This document is no longer on-line. Substitiute this 
one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King%2C_Jr._-
_authorship_issues]
The first public revelation of King's plagiarized Ph.D. 
dissertation came in the London Telegraph (Dec. 3, 1989). The 
story was suppressed in the U.S. until January, 1991, when 
Pappas blew the lid off. (Theodore Pappas, "A Doctor in Spite of 
Himself: The Strange Career of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 
Dissertation," Chronicles [Jan. 1991].) The appearance of this 
article forced the American press to admit what King had done, 
how the editor of King's papers had suppressed the fact for 
years, lying to those who inquired about this.

The large number of plagiarized sources in everything King wrote 
and preached, from the beginning of his career, is visible in 
volume 1 of his Papers (Berkeley: University of California 
Press, 1992); the plagiarized originals appear in the footnotes. 
The publication of this volume was delayed for many years 
because of this public relations problem.

The response of the academic community and the media indicates 
that liberals' icons are not allowed to be publicly embarrassed, 
in life or posthumously. The CHRONICLES article led to a series 
of defenses of King's plagiarism, including an immediate one 
written by a Roman Catholic professor of metaphysics: George F. 
McLean, "King's Scholarship Was Central to His Vision," Wall 
Street Journal (Jan. 21, 1991).

In 1992, an untenured English professor at Arizona State 
University, Keith Miller, had his book published: a defense of 
King's plagiarism, which he calls "intertextualizations," 
"incorporations," "borrowings," "echoing," "resonances," and 
"voice merging." On the defense, see Keith Miller, Voice of 
Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King Jr., and Its 
Sources (New York: Free Press, 1992). This book was reviewed by 
Pappas, "A Houdini of Time," Chronicle (Nov. 1992).

A faculty committee at Boston University, which awarded King the 
Ph.D., concluded in 1991 that the first half of his dissertation 
was 45 percent stolen, the second half was 21 percent stolen, 
but the thesis nonetheless remains legitimate and "an 
intelligent contribution to scholarship." The school did not 
revoke his degree. (Pappas, Martin Luther King, p. 103.)

Reed Irvine, who runs Accuracy in Media, a conservative media-
monitoring organization, has summarized the scandal.

Theodore Pappas has written a piece for Chronicles magazine that 
should be required reading for every journalism student and 
journalist. It tells the story of how the media, including book 
publishers, tried to suppress the story of how famed civil 
rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King committed plagiarism -- 
stealing material from other people and claiming it as his own. 
For his role in bringing this to the public's attention, Pappas 
says he received three death threats, one left hook to the jaw 
and 40 rejections from 40 publishers in 40 months. This is quite 
a record. When he finally found a publisher, the book's first 
edition was sold out. It carried the title, The Martin Luther 
King, Jr. Plagiarism Story.
Pappas recounts his effort in publicizing the story in the May 
issue of Chronicles magazine, where he serves as managing 
editor. Pappas was the first journalist who exposed, with 
parallel quotations, how segments of King's Ph.D dissertation 
had been copied from a previous work. He estimates that 66 
percent of King's dissertation was plagiarized. On top of 
revelations about King's womanizing, the plagiarism allegations 
served to demonstrate that while King postured as a paragon of 
moral virtue, he was in reality a scoundrel. This is not 
something that a lot of people wanted to hear.

The Wall Street Journal, considered by some a conservative 
newspaper, heard the story was breaking and ran its own piece -- 
a whitewash of the charges against King. Even the Journal's 
editorial page tried to suppress the significance of the story 
by insisting that it had to be covered in a "carefully 
modulated" manner.

Writing in the New Republic magazine, Charles Babington would 
later reveal that the Washington Post, the New York Times and 
the New Republic itself all had known the facts about King's 
plagiarism but refused to publish them. The Times eventually did 
cover the issue but in a subsequent editorial suggested that the 
plagiarism was somehow comparable to a politician using a ghost 
writer for speeches.

Pappas's expanded version of the King Plagiarism Story has now 
been published by Hallberg Publishing Corporation under the 
title "Plagiarism and the Culture War." Regarding the publishers 
who rejected his original book and the new edition, Pappas says 
three of them said any criticism of King would be in "bad taste" 
because "King isn't around to defend himself." Pappas notes that 
such an approach would mean the end of historical studies and 
scholarship in general. He points out that such an attitude 
hasn't stopped various so-called "scholars" and academics from 
defaming one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. 
Apparently it's all right to bad-mouth Jefferson; after all, he 
was a white European male. But King, a black civil rights 
leader, has to be spared any criticism. This is the double-
standard that infects the media today. . . .

http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/1998/05/11.htm
Prof. Trout of the University of Montana -- a fitting name for 
anyone who lives in Montana -- has written an excellent piece on 
how a rising tide of plagiarism is now undermining higher 
education. (Stealing from the Web is easy, but students can also 
buy essays on-line.) He writes:

One notorious plagiarism case -- involving, sadly, Martin Luther 
King, Jr. -- illustrates that some professors not only ignore 
plagiarism but excuse it.
In 1991 a panel of scholars at Boston University ruled that Dr. 
King plagiarized parts of his 1952 doctoral dissertation at BU 
by "appropriating material from sources not explicitly credited 
in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally and at 
some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or verbatim 
quotation." A careful analysis of King's dissertation by 
Theodore Pappas revealed that over sixty percent was copied from 
an earlier dissertation. Clayborne Carson, director of the 
Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, and professor of history 
at Stanford University, found additionally that King's student 
essays and published and unpublished addresses and essays all 
contain "numerous instances of plagiarism and, more generally, 
textual appropriation."

When the charges became public, some professors -- both black 
and white -- rushed to palliate or deny King's wrongdoing. The 
most bald-faced effort came from the Acting President of Boston 
University (October 1990): "Dr. King's dissertation has, in 
fact, been scrupulously examined and reexamined by 
scholars...Not a single instance of plagiarism of any sort has 
been identified" (in Pappas Plagiarism 68). Taking a similar 
tack, the committee of BU academics found "no blatancy" in the 
plagiarism despite the fact that King appropriated page after 
page from other works.

Others tried to palliate the offense by saying it was the result 
of "carelessness" (despite the fact that King had taken a 
graduate course in thesis writing). A few, like Keith D. Miller, 
an English professor at Arizona State University, notoriously 
argued that King merely had drawn on the oral traditions of the 
black church in which "voice merging" -- the blending of the 
words and ideas of those who spoke before -- is commonplace. A 
somewhat conflicted Professor Carson went further, describing 
King's "pattern of unacknowledged appropriation of words and 
ideas," which he does label "plagiarism," as a "legitimate 
utilization of political, philosophical, and literary texts" 
that allowed King "to express his ideas effectively using the 
words of others" via a "successful composition method." And 
Professor George McLean praised King's plagiarized dissertation 
as "a contribution in scholarship for which his doctorate was 
richly deserved" (in Pappas "Life and Times" 43). As Theodore 
Pappas points out, to say that [King's] doctorate was "richly 
deserved" when 66 percent of his dissertation was plagiarized is 
"absurd and dishonest" (Ibid.).

But "absurdity" and "dishonesty" now often trump adherence to 
the academic creed. When confronted with irrefutable proof of 
plagiarism, what did many notable scholars do? In the words of 
Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Research Professor of Religious 
Studies at the University of South Florida:

They lied, they told half-truths, they made up fables, they did 
everything they could but address facts; three enlightened 
individuals even threatened [Pappas's] life. 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 reworded matters to make them sound less 
dreadful, they compromised their own university's integrity and 
the rules supposedly enforced to defend and protect the process 
of learning and the consequent degrees. They called into 
question the very standing of the university as a place where 
cheating is penalized and misrepresentation condemned (in 
Pappas, I 1).
http://mtprof.msun.edu/Fall1999/creed.html
Jacob Neusner is probably the most prolific scholar in American 
history. Five or six years ago, I asked him to send me a copy of 
his published works. He did. The list was then over 30 single-
spaced pages long. He is a publishing phenomenon like no other I 
am aware of. He has every right to complain about what King did.

CONCLUSION

There is a common belief today that men's private sins should 
not be considered in our assessment of their public lives. This 
public philosophy can be summarized as follows: "Cigars shared 
between consenting adults don't count." It is always applied by 
liberals to liberals. Sometimes it applies to conservatives, 
unless the sins involve money, especially Political Action 
Committee money taken from business. But money taken by the 
Democratic National Committee from agents of Communist China is 
like Martin Luther King, Jr.'s plagiarism: irrelevant.

There is a now-discarded phrase: "If a man will cheat on his 
wife, he will cheat on anyone." That is my view. That is the way 
I vote, when I vote.

King was right about Rosa Parks. He was right about non-
violence. But what he did to other men's wives, and to his own 
wife, was unconscionable. Also unconscionable was his career-
long theft of the words that he stole for public use. But the 
liberals who dismiss all of this are worse, for they seek to 
make intellectual theft and adultery seem irrelevant. They 
prefer to undermine the ethics of civilization for the sake of 
politics and race.

http://www.garynorth.com/public/335.cfm
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