Dismayed but Forgiving of MLK’s Plagiarism

I am on record as stating that Dr. Martin Luther King is not the only hero of the civil rights movement. King did not do it by himself—indeed, the process began long before he was born—but he deserves a lot of credit. I admire and respect him for multiple reasons. A man of courage and vision, he was a true leader. I wish I had been among the 1,200 people present when he spoke at the University of Texas on March 9, 1962 (after the Montgomery bus boycott and before his showdown with Bull Connor in Birmingham), but I would not reach Austin until 1971.

Regardless of my high esteem for King, I know he was no angel. This is not because he was a world-class adulterer; such information comes largely from wiretaps conducted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, for which Attorney General Robert Kennedy gave approval.  No, the issue is a bugaboo that has wrecked many an academic career: plagiarism.

King was unquestionably a smart guy, but he maintained just a C+ average during his undergraduate days at Morehouse College (a black institution). He was considered an academic underachiever in Atlanta. So it is curious that he immediately became an A- student when he went to Crozer Theological Seminary (a mostly white institution) in Pennsylvania to seek a divinity degree. It was more of the same at Boston University as he got top grades in pursuit of a Ph.D. He graduated from Crozer in 1951 and BU in 1955. Some critics/enemies have all but accused the latter two schools of pampering King, doing so out of white guilt and an early version of “affirmative action.” I am unconvinced, because the professors and administrators could not have known the young man was destined to be such a titanic figure in modern American history. In the early 1950s, he was just an earnest student, one with a promising future in the pulpit. So perhaps he earned all those A’s.

With the passage of 34 years, however, King’s academic achievements were thrown into doubt. It began with an article by British journalist Frank Johnson entitled “Martin Luther King—Was He a Plagiarist”? in the December 3, 1989 issue of the Sunday Telegraph. Johnson showed that large sections of King’s dissertation, A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, had been lifted from a dissertation done by another BU student (Jack Boozer) three years earlier. This information may have come to Johnson from Stanford University’s King Papers Project. As those papers, donated by Coretta Scott King, were being organized and catalogued, staffers took note. It was an explosive revelation, possibly leading the people at Stanford to keep quiet. But Johnson wrote his story, followed by others in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other publications. Boston University began an investigation that confirmed it and more. King had a long habit of copying without attribution. There was an unmistakable pattern of appropriation, which begs the question of whether King’s academic advisors at BU (Drs. L. Harold DeWolf and S. Paul Schilling) saw it and let it slide.

When Boozer was informed in 1988 that much of his dissertation had been copied, he was stunned but not really upset. A careful academic who put a high value on scholarship, he hoped the issue would just go away.  Boozer was a native of Alabama and supporter of the civil rights movement, and thought of MLK as a friend and colleague. His wife said he was willing to dismiss it as a minor matter, nothing more than King’s failure to use footnotes.

King’s dissertation was not revoked, as happened with many other scholars who had been caught cheating. Instead, in 1991 a letter was placed in the file holding it in the BU library—barely even a slap on the wrist. It emphasized that King’s dissertation, faulty though it was, made a valuable contribution to academe. His reputation at Boston University was unsullied. A plaque adorns a house King lived in during his student days, and there are symposia, professorships (the Martin Luther King Chair in Social Ethics, for example) and honors galore. BU fully embraces this distinguished alumnus.

Some people, of course, were appalled. King had committed a graduate student’s cardinal sin: taking the ideas and words of another scholar verbatim and presenting them as his own. None of this came to light until long after his death by assassination in April 1968. King’s final 13 years were hectic and pressure-filled, and he had other things on his mind. Some defenders—most notably Dr. Keith Miller of Arizona State University—have bent over backward to minimize, justify and excuse his transgressions. That got harder when it was proven that the closing section of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. in 1963 closely resembled Archibald Carey’s address at the 1952 Republican convention. In 1962, King was at a service outside a church in Georgia that had been burned by the Ku Klux Klan. A fellow civil rights activist, Prathia Hall, uttered a spontaneous prayer in which she rhythmically repeated the phrase “I have a dream.” In February 1968 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, King issued a sermon of great rhetorical power he called “Drum Major Instinct” in which he seemingly delivered his own epitaph. But several multi-sentence segments could be found in sermons given years before by a white liberal minister named J. Wallace Hamilton. As a final example, his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” borrows heavily from Harry Emerson Fosdick. (Speeches, sermons and letters, needless to say, should not be confused with doctoral dissertations, so I cut King some slack here.)

Simply put, King was wrong to borrow/steal from Boozer in 1955. He was a sloppy academic, and of that there can be no doubt. But it is a relatively—note that modifier—unimportant issue in light of his life’s work. King, whose great-grandfather was a slave preacher, has been called with good reason the most outstanding theologian America has ever produced. When his house was bombed by segregationists soon after the Montgomery bus boycott, angry supporters gathered and called for a response in kind. The good reverend, arrested 20 times and assaulted four times in his career, calmed them by quoting Jesus: “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you and pray for those who spitefully use you”; his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize was well deserved. What King did in leading the civil rights movement is such that his shortcomings as a grad student and his sexual escapades can be forgiven. It’s not that he had feet of clay, but he was human like the rest of us.