A look at King’s oratorical genius, his academic plagiarism and the words that changed the world.
In His Own Words
“All I’m trying to say is, our world hinges on moral foundations. God has made it so! God has made the universe to be based on a moral law.
“There is something in this universe that justifies Carlyle in saying, ‘No lie can live forever.’ There is something in this universe that justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying, ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ There is something in this universe that justifies James Russell Lowell in saying, ‘Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, with that scaffold sways the future. Behind the dim unknown stands God, within the shadow keeping watch above his own.’
– from Rediscovering Lost Values, sermon, 1954
Careful Thought, Careless Writing
King’s years at Crozer and B.U. were paradoxical — a man on the one hand, sincerely in search of a construction of religion that he felt embraced the eternal Truth; at the same time regularly using other’s ideas and words in reports, sermons, and theses without giving credit. His plagiarism isn’t easily explained away as laziness or intellectual treachery. King consistently received high marks on his tests, where there is no evidence of cheating.
Like Somebody Said
When I was in college at the University of Texas, I used to go cultural conferences each year in Dallas. The organizers booked speakers whose academic work in Afrocentric studies gave us the historic and cultural background we craved. For example:
- We learned from Professor Ivan Van Sertima of Rutgers University that Africans had explored, traded, and lived among the native Americans long before Columbus.
- Dr. Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University expounded on the achievements of blacks in every field of endeavor.
They, and others like them, nourished our need to know of the achievements of blacks in a reasoned, yet passionate way, and I looked forward to every trip.
But at some point, I stopped going. It was in the early ’90s, and it was my last conference attendance because, as much as I looked forward to the visiting professors that year, they had all begun to sound alike. They were using each other’s phrases, even intonations. Because I was covering the event for a local newspaper, I asked one of the speakers how it could be. “Oh, we’re like preachers,” he said. “If I admire someone’s scholarship, and the information seems to gratify the audience, I’ll incorporate it into my own speech. It’s done all the time; you really notice it when you visit Baptist churches.”
In I May Not Get There With You, Michael Eric Dyson writes, “All preachers liberally borrow themes, ideas, phrases, and approaches from one another.”
Our beloved Afrocentric professors were preachers of the achievements of blacks in world cultures. They sampled one another’s words and ideas, just as Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke the words of others to uplift, to teach, and to revolutionize the social order. Around the world, black culture is primarily an oral culture. And in an oral culture, it is not only accepted, but also expected that a good speaker will tap into familiar themes.
Dyson goes on to say that, “King spoke much the way a jazz musician plays, improvising . . . The same song is never the same song, and for King, the same speech was never the same speech . . . He could bend ideas and slide memorized passages through his trumpet of a voice with remarkable sensitivity to his audience’s make up.”
In an oral culture, verbal appropriation is not much of an issue, although few speakers would take lengthy word-for-word passages and try to pass them off as their own. King’s use of unattributed passages in his written work, and uncited sources in his academic work, is another story altogether.
King entered Morehouse College at the age of 15, as part of a program that granted admission to younger men because of the shortage of men due to World War II. He earned good marks, but he admitted, “Though I had been one of the top students in high school, I was still reading at only an eighth grade level.” Existing evidence shows that he was sloppy about formally citing the sources he used to reach his conclusions in the papers that he wrote. Even his work at Crozer failed to list sources, although Dyson writes that in most cases, “His errors might have easily been corrected had he taken more time to place quotation marks around material amply cited and had he refined his skills at paraphrasing others’ work.”
His bad habits continued at Boston University, where King plagiarized the two main subjects of his dissertations. No one knows why King, who received high marks on his examinations, plagiarized large portions of his written work. It cannot be explained in the same way as his verbal sampling of others’ words. He was simply too intelligent, too sophisticated, and too disciplined a student to chalk it up to academic insufficiency.
Some speculate that King’s teachers gave him a break because he was black. Others say that the pressure of attending a predominantly white university made King succumb to plagiarism as a means to an end. Such an argument ignores King’s later assertions that the means and the end have to hang together in a moral universe. Still others assume that King’s youth, combined with the aforementioned pressures and his determination to become a preacher — as opposed to a theologian — nudged him to make the wrong choice.
According to Dyson, “Not to get the degree would be a greater failure than cheating to get it. The fault lies not simply with King, though he bears the lion’s share of the blame, but with a world that demanded that he and others perform under such conditions.” The wonder, Dyson writes, is not that King cheated under these conditions, but that other black scholars did not.
The pressures on these scholars and King were so great that not once in his entire academic career did King write a paper on anything having to do with race. He simply never mentioned the thing that was foremost in his mind and heart — in all his work on the nature of evil, justice, love, and sin — race. Why?
Some statistics show that even now, blacks and Hispanics, even those with middle- and upper-class backgrounds, often score lower on standardized tests and graduate from college in lower numbers compared to whites. Dyson attributes this, at least in part, to “stereotype threat — the enormous pressure of feeling under relentless white scrutiny and living with the fear of confirming stereotypes of black identity.” Indeed, King is described at both Crozer and B.U. as, “terribly tense, unable to escape the fact that he was a Negro in a mostly white world.”
These explanations are not attempts to justify King’s academic dishonesty, but to understand it. During the controversy over King’s plagiarism, a New York Times editorial stated that while it was important to denounce his scholarship: “that should not be confused with his leadership. Whether or not, as a student, he wrote what he wrote, Dr. King did what he did. He and many with him pushed Americans down the road to racial justice. That achievement glows unchallenged through the present shadow. Martin Luther King’s courage was not copied; and there was no plagiarism in his power.”
A Closer Look
When I was in elementary school, I entered a poetry contest using an obscure poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I won, and before the guilt I felt could consume me alive, my dishonesty was discovered. That one incident from my childhood haunted me for years and is at the root of my insecurity as a writer.
By every account, King suffered from punishing guilt that probably had its roots in his academic dishonesty. He never felt worthy of the accolades that were heaped upon him and, along with his numerous sexual indiscretions, his scholastic work probably caused him a great deal of agony, though he never corrected either. King was a great man, and as Dyson writes, greatly flawed.
Assignment: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
King said: “A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.”
Visit http://www.mlkday.com/theman_index.htmlml and read “The Purpose of Education.” Assess your own education in light of what King had to say. Write down your thoughts about how America could make some fundamental improvements to its educational system.
King was found to have been negligent in attributing sources in his written assignments. Have you ever cheated? What was the outcome? How do you feel about it now? Are there any other circumstances in which you might cheat again? How do you feel about Dr. King’s academic dishonesty? Do you have any insights into why he may have done it?
