“I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal
my words every one from his neighbour.”

—Jeremiah 23:30

After seven years on public and private payrolls as senior editor of the King Papers Project, Clayborne Carson has finally produced the first volume of MLK’s papers. The project began in 1984, and since 1986 has received a half-million dollars of the taxpayers’ money via the National Endowment for the Humanities. Concerning the amount of public funds going directly to Carson’s salary, the NEH says “this is confidential information off-limits to the public.” The project is also backed by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, James Irvine Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Stanford University, Emory University, IBM, Intel, and the Stanford University Associates of the King Papers Project. These are many of the same sources that, along with the NEH, have supported the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, whose U.C.L.A. editor began collecting documents in 1970 and has still finished only seven volumes of the 11-volume set. Clyde Wilson—editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun, and with a staff of one and a bare-bones budget—has published 11 volumes in 15 years.

If Clayborne Carson had been candid with the public from the very beginning of the controversy over King’s plagiarisms, the long delay in publishing the first volume might be excused and justified. After all, the thousands of plagiarized passages in King’s sermons, speeches, college papers, seminary essays, doctoral dissertation, and published book reviews and articles could so overwhelm an editor that a plea for patience would be understandable. But Carson chose duplicity over disclosure, opting to misrepresent the facts, to hide the truth as long as possible, and to set in motion the official spin on the controversy.

In 1989, when he was asked by Frank Johnson of the London Telegraph about the “rumor” that King plagiarized his 1955 doctoral dissertation at Boston University, Carson called the charge unwarranted, saying “It’s really not true [that King plagiarized].” Even after the story broke Carson persisted in applying whitewash with half-truths and academic doubletalk. He spoke not of plagiarism—the dreaded “p-word” that he forbade everyone at the project’s headquarters at Stanford ever to use—but of “paraphrasing,” “similarities,” and “textual appropriations” as “part of a successful composition method.” This blather and “lack of forthrightness” with the truth led the Journal of American History to reject the article he had submitted to explain the controversy.

But the whitewash went well beyond Carson and the King Papers Project. Boston University’s then acting-president, Jon Westling, flatly denied in Chronicles that “a single instance of plagiarism of any sort has been identified,” and B.U.’s “Martin Luther King Professor of Social Ethics,” John Cartwright, who even sat on the B.U. committee that analyzed King’s thesis, claimed “there is no obvious indication in the dissertation that he inappropriately utilized material.” The Wall Street Journal admitted King’s plagiarism, but then concluded that the theft reflects not on his character but rather “tells something about the rest of us.” Such sophistry and drivel did not get past the London Telegraph, which reported “such is the cravenness of the U. S. media when it comes to race that no newspaper followed [our 1989] story . . . . Then, in an article full of apologetic, mealy-mouthed phrases, the Wall Street Journal confirmed our findings.”

Not surprisingly, Carson and the project have come out of the controversy nearly as clean and unscathed as King has himself. The Washington Post recently hailed Carson’s work in an article entitled “Called to Serve,” and Eugene Genovese in a review of volume one for the New Republic wrote glowingly of Carson’s “professional integrity,” his “tact and good sense,” and of the “splendid job” of volume editor Ralph Luker, declaring that Coretta King and her advisory board have “every reason to be proud of their choice of a general editor and of the staff he put together.” Amid encomia and hagiography as heavy as this, it seems heartless to point out that Ralph Luker was long ago fired from the King Papers Project as the “fall guy” for the controversy over King’s dissertation, that Coretta King and Carson locked horns in a bitter struggle over control of King’s dissertation note cards, and that one of Carson’s associates blames the publication delays and problems with the project on Coretta King’s lack of cooperation.

Volume one documents the period from King’s birth to his application to the doctoral program at B.U. and summarizes his family history in an introduction by the volume editors. King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, the son of the revered pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. After attending a number of schools in Atlanta, he passed a special examination in 1944 to enter Morehouse College without having earned his high school diploma. He graduated in 1948 with a degree in sociology and entered the Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. Obtaining his bachelor’s degree in divinity in 1951, he then enrolled in the doctoral program at B.U.’s School of Theology.

King was reared, in his own words, “in a very congenial home situation,” with parents who “always lived together very intimately.” Closest to him was his maternal grandmother, whose death in 1941 left him emotionally unstable. Remorseful because he had learned of her fatal heart attack while attending a parade without his parents’ permission, the 12-year-old Martin attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.

Most striking about the Kings is the affluence they enjoyed during the Depression. As King, Sr., himself admitted, “the deacons took great pride in knowing that [he] was the best-paid Negro minister in the city.” In fact, while millions of white and black Americans were queuing in bread lines. King, Sr., was touring France, Italy, Germany, and the Holy Land. Though he refused to join the migration to the more prestigious areas of Atlanta to which middle- and upper-middleclass blacks like himself were then moving. King’s father did buy a larger home in his same neighborhood, “thus fulfilling a childhood ambition of King, Sr., to own such a house. Enjoying the benefits of his family’s affluence. King, Jr., became active in the social life of middle-class Atlanta.”

The key phrase above reads not “middle-class black Atlanta” but simply “middle-class Atlanta,” and it was the bourgeois culture of white America that shaped King’s early adult years. When King entered the Crozer Theological Seminary in 1948, he was one of only 11 black students of a student body nearing a hundred. He immersed himself “in the social and intellectual life of a predominantly white, northern seminary,” and “most accounts of King’s experiences at Crozer suggest that he actively sought out social contacts with white students and faculty members.” Known for his wonderful oratorical skills. King became one of the most popular students on campus and was even elected president of the student body, a feat that did not go unnoticed among the faculty and administration. As Crozer’s Professor Morton Enslin wrote in his letter of recommendation for King to B.U.

The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation. The comparatively small number of forward-looking and thoroughly trained negro leaders is, as I am sure you will agree, still so small that it is more than an even chance that one as adequately trained as King will find ample opportunity for useful service. He is entirely free from those somewhat annoying qualities which some men of his race acquire when they find themselves in the distinct higher percent of their group.

King’s eagerness and ability to mix well with white students becomes significant when seen in light of his performance during Crozer’s fieldwork program. On the basis of King’s preaching to black congregations, the evaluator of the program, the Reverend William E. Gardner—who was also a friend of the King family—determined Martin’s “strongest points” to be his “clarity of expression, impressive personality,” his chief weakness “an attitude of aloofness, disdain and possible snobbishness which prevent his coming to close grips with the rank and file of ordinary people. Also, a smugness that refuses to adapt itself to the demands of ministering effectively to the average Negro congregation.”

The editors conclude from this that King had “become somewhat estranged from his Ebenezer roots.” Other evidence suggests that he may have inherited the class consciousness that other family members had exhibited. The editors admit in the introduction that Martin’s grandfather, A. D. Williams, had made money off a controversial business venture that targeted poor blacks. The black-run Atlanta Independent in 1909 called the stock that Williams was selling in a Mexican silver mine a “fake, pure and simple,” and encouraged him “to explain . . . this fraudulent scheme” to the “many thousands of poor Negroes that are being defrauded throughout the state.”

As Professor Enslin’s letter to B.U. suggests. King was not recommended for doctoral studies because of intellectual distinction or academic achievement. In fact, we know from his scores on the Graduate Record Exam that King scored in the second lowest quartile in English and vocabulary, in the lowest ten percent in quantitative analysis, and in the lowest third on his advanced test in philosophy—the very subject he would concentrate in at B.U. Instead, King was recommended because he socialized well with white students, had won white support and approval, could be of “useful service” in the future, and, so far from displaying any of those “annoying qualities” that other Negroes exhibited (whatever this means), had even showed a disdain toward Negroes of a lower socioeconomic order. It was clearly on the basis of race, not scholarship, that Professor Enslin recommended King for doctoral studies.

The possibility that King benefited from an early form of affirmative action—from a lowering of academic standards or from preferential treatment because of his race—gains credence when his years of plagiarizing are considered. Though the editors treat this issue as gingerly as possible, their volume clearly proves that King was an inveterate plagiarist who began pilfering at an early age. The speech he gave in an oratorical contest at the age of 15 is not only, as the editors say, “more polished than other pieces that King wrote as a teenager,” it is more polished than anything King “wrote” as an adult in either college or seminary. The editors conclude that the “essay probably benefited from adult editing and from King’s awareness of similar orations.” Put more bluntly, the speech was either written by an adult or copped from an unknown source.

The evidence of King’s pilferage is overwhelming. The editors do not highlight the stolen sections but simply reprint in footnotes without editorial comment the original passages King plagiarized, making the footnotes in this volume often as long and tedious as the documents themselves. Sample one of the many “borrowed” passages in King’s essay on “Ritual,” written as a junior or senior at Morehouse College:

King: Plagiarized source:

All feasts are divided into two classes, feasts of precept and feasts of devotion. The feasts of precept are holydays [sic] on which the Faithful in most Catholic countries refrain from unnecessary servile labor and attend Mass. These include all the Sundays in the year, Christmas Day, the circumcism [sic] . . .

 
All feasts are divided into two classes, feasts of precept and feasts of devotion. The feasts of precept are holydays [sic] on which the Faithful in most Catholic countries refrain from unnecessary servile labor and attend Mass. These include all the Sundays in the year, Christmas Day, the circumcism [sic] . . .

From King’s essay on “The Significant Contributions of Jeremiah to Religious Thought,” written during his first term at Crozer:

King: Plagarized Source:
The Temple was the pivot of the nation’s religion. It was a national institution, linked intimately with the fortunes of the race. In the course of years elaborate ceremonies were enacted, and the priests prescribed sacrifices, and the smoke of burnt-offerings rose high from the altar. The Temple was the apple of the people’s eye. To critcise [sic] it was to set aflame the fires of both religion and patriotism. And this was the very thing that Jeremiah did. [This Temple] was the . . . pivot of the nation’s religion. . . . It was a national institution, linked intimately with the fortunes of the race. . . . In the course of centuries an elaborate liturgical ceremony came to be enacted there, and the priests prescribed sacrifices, and the smoke of burnt-offerings rose high from the altar. . . . The Temple was the apple of the people’s eye. To touch it was to set aflame the fires of both religion and patriotism. And this was just the very thing that the prophet did.

King’s plagiarisms are easy to detect because their style rises above the level of his pedestrian student prose. In general, if the sentences are eloquent, witty, insightful, or pithy, or contain allusions, analogies, metaphors, or similes, it is safe to assume that the section has been purloined. “To set aflame the fires of both religion and patriotism,” “It was the eye of Yahweh that was forever searching the thoughts and intents of the heart,” “Evil is the Satan that laughs at logic,” “Religion [is] the response of the heart to the voice of God,”—all are flags of King’s “textual appropriations.”

In fact, King’s plagiarisms grow more sweeping with each year he progresses in higher education. For instance, in his essay on “A Study of Mithraism,” which he “composed” during his second year at Crozer, King lifts verbatim entire paragraphs from Franz Cumont’s well-known The Mysteries of Mithra and W.R. Halliday’s The Pagan Background of Early Christianity. Also evident in this essay is King’s “composition method” of plagiarizing himself, meaning his recycling into “new” essays huge sections verbatim of compositions he had written in previous years for other classes.

But these examples from King’s early terms at Crozer pale in comparison to the thefts committed during his final two years, and in particular to the papers King composed for Professor George Washington Davis. Carson and company see nothing unusual in the fact that King took nine courses from this professor, because “so theologically compatible were King and Davis” and because King “forged his own theological perspective” in Davis’s courses, for which “King’s essays for Davis displayed a greater degree of intellectual engagement” than those he had written for other Crozer professors.

If what the editors say is true, King’s compositions for Professor Davis should be the best argued, best written, most erudite and original of all his essays. The evidence suggests otherwise. From the introduction to King’s “The Sources of Fundamentalism”: King:

King: Plagiarized source:
In the course of its development western civilization has shifted from a colonial naiveté of the frontier to the far-reaching machination of nationalism and from an agrarian pattern of occupation to the industrial one. . . . In the course of its development western civilization has shifted from a colonial naiveté of the frontier to the far-reaching machinations of nationalism and from an agrarian pattern of occupation to the industrial one. . . .

Plagiarism continues throughout eight of the remaining 13 paragraphs of the essay.

From the introduction to King’s “The Origin of Religion in the Race”:

King: Plagiarized source:
Before we come to consider some modern theories it may be well to refer briefly to two views which were once widely prevalent, but which are now obsolete or at least absolescent [sic]. Before we come to consider some modern theories it may be well to refer briefly to two views which were once widely prevalent, but which are now obsolete or obsolescent.

Only three of the remaining 22 paragraphs in the essay are not replete with verbatim plagiarisms, often of entire paragraphs. From King’s essay on “The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus”:

King: Plagiarized sources:
If there is any one thing of which modern Christians have been certain it is that Jesus was a true man, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, in all points tempted as we are. . . . Like the rest of us, he got hungry. When at the well of Sameria [sic] he asked the woman who was drawing water for a drink. When he grew tired, he needed rest and sleep. . . . On the Cross, he added to all physical tortures the final agony of feeling Cod-forsaken. If there is any one thing of which Christians have been certain it is that Jesus is true man, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, in all points tempted as we are. . . . Like the rest of us, he was hungry. At the well at Samaria he asked the woman who was drawing water for a drink. When he grew tired, he needed rest and sleep. . . . On the Cross, he added to all physical tortures the final agony of feeling God-forsaken.

Regarding some of the other essays King wrote for Professor Davis, of the 37 paragraphs in his essay on “The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity,” 11 are recycled from two essays written in previous years and 24 of the remaining 26 paragraphs are replete with verbatim plagiarisms. In “The Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism,” 16 of the 20 paragraphs are stolen directly from unacknowledged sources. In “Religion’s Answer to the Problem of Evil,” only 14 of the 38 paragraphs are free of verbatim plagiarisms.

Again, Carson concludes from these “engaged” essays. which Davis routinely gave “A’s,” and from the nine courses King took from Davis, that the student and the professor were merely “compatible.” A simpler conclusion is that the professor had been snowed. We know from comments written on King’s essays that some professors reprimanded him for incomplete footnotes, but there is no evidence to indicate that they ever realized the extent of King’s pilfering.

The editors admit in their introduction that King’s essays possess “unacknowledged textual appropriations,” which “meet a strict definition of plagiarism,” but they hasten to assure us that there is still no “definite answer to the question whether King deliberately violated the standards that applied to him as a student.” If the editors do not know what academic standards are, at least King himself did. He plainly states on page seven of his dissertation, “The present inquiry will utilize from these valuable secondary sources any results which bear directly on the problem, and will indicate such use by appropriate footnotes,” and then proceeds to steal word-for-word and without any acknowledgment whatsoever huge sections from the thesis of Jack Boozer.

Eugene Genovese also admits King’s pilferage, but writes off its significance as a mere “impatience with scholarly procedures,” something that should not diminish our appreciation of King’s “fine” mind. After all. King may have plagiarized his way through college, seminary, and graduate school, but this was “not an expression of laziness or an unwillingness to do the required work”! How can we ever know?

While Carson and his fellow apologists are making a heroic effort to palliate King’s literary and academic shenanigans, Keith Miller boldly takes the bull by the horns. An assistant professor of English at Arizona State University, Miller cheerfully admits King’s plagiarisms, or rather his “unattributed appropriations,” “intertextualizations,” “incorporations,” “borrowings,” “alchemizing,” “overlapping,” “adopting,” “synthesizing,” “replaying,” “echoing,” “resonances,” “reverberations,” and “voice merging.” But far from wanting to trivialize the facts. Miller argues that King’s pilferage was intentional, and even an integral and laudatory part of the civil rights movement. For by interweaving stolen texts into his speeches and essays, and by stealing in particular the words of liberal white ministers. King “foolproofed his discourse” and was able to “change the minds of moderate and uncommitted whites” toward solving “the nation’s most horrific problem—racial injustice.” This “method of composition” is what Miller terms “voice merging” and associates with the borrowing of sermons common among black folk preachers.

The most useful portions of this book are those in which Miller sets forth the sources of King’s nonacademic works. He occasionally mentions King’s famous antiwar speeches that were ghostwritten by Andrew Young and other supporters, but he highlights the pilfered sources behind King’s landmark orations on civil rights. King’s Nobel Prize Lecture, for example, is plagiarized extensively from works by Florida minister J. Wallace Hamilton; the sections on Gandhi and nonviolence in his “Pilgrimage” speech are stolen virtually verbatim from Harris Wofford’s speech on the same topic; the frequently replayed climax to the “I Have a Dream” speech—the “from every mountainside, let freedom ring” portion—is taken directly from a 1952 address to the Republican National Convention by a black preacher named Archibald Carey; the 1968 sermon in which King prophesied his martyrdom was based on works by J. Wallace Hamilton and Methodist minister Harold Bosley; even the “Letter From the Birmingham Jail,” that “great American essay” so often reproduced in textbooks on composition, is based on work by Harry Fosdick, H. H. Crane, and Harris Wofford—all sources King could recall from memory because of the frequency with which he had “merged” with them in the past.

Miller’s research is indispensable for understanding King’s works, but his intoxicating thesis proves fatal to his judgment:

King’s achievements are awesome. Borrowed sermons gave white Americans their best—and probably last—chance to solve what had always been the nation’s worst problem. Not only did voice merging keep Jefferson’s dream alive, it also helped compel the White House to withdraw from the nightmare of Vietnam. Then in the wake of his movement came the second wave of American feminism, the campaign for gay rights, and the crusade to save the environment.

All this owed to plagiarism! Miller apparently believes that every social and protest movement of our time is rooted in dishonesty. A more fundamental problem with Miller’s thesis is lack of proof. He offers no documentation, confession, or interview of any sort—nothing to prove that King deliberately plagiarized white sources to garner white support for the civil rights movement. Nor does his argument account for the plagiarisms King committed throughout college, seminary, and his doctoral studies—all of which occurred long before he ever became what Miller calls “the unofficial president of an oppressed people.”

Miller explains away such pilferage with his “voice merging” theory—that King plagiarized because he was unable (and still unable after 11 years of higher education and three academic degrees) to separate himself from the black homiletic tradition of “borrowing” other people’s work. On one level, this argument is equivalent to saying, “King’s plagiarism is a black thing. You whites with your standards wouldn’t understand.” But the deeper implication is that originality and true scholarship cannot be expected of blacks, that because of their oral traditions blacks cannot differentiate between the pulpit and the classroom, between Sunday sermons and professional standards, between the mores of folk art and the demands of high culture. How flattering this is to all the black doctors, black lawyers, black theologians, and black scholars who have made and continue to make their way honestly in the world.

Miller concludes by suggesting that the country should be grateful for King’s commitment to plagiarism. For stealing the works of others “let King escape the restrictions of the clock and therein become a Houdini of time. . . . This ubiquitous leader could magically advise senators, write a column, publish an essay, rally voters, placate unruly staffers, preach a sermon, and comfort a church janitor—all in a single day. . . . Barnstorming the nation as a Houdini of time became possible only because King consulted sources and thereby foolproofed his discourse.” King certainly was a master of illusion and deception, but his discourse was hardly foolproof.

 

[The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume I: Called to Serve, January 1929-June 1951, Senior Editor: Clayborne Carson, Volume Editors: Ralph E. Luker and Penny A. Russell (Berkeley: University of California Press) 484 pp., $35.00]

[Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Its Sources, by Keith D. Miller (New York: The Free Press) 282 pp., $22.95]