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The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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On Martin Luther King's Plagiarism ...

Ralph Luker

Fifteen years ago, with Stanford's Clayborne Carson , I was responsible for directing research on Martin Luther King's early life for the Martin Luther King Papers Project . The arrangement was a sort of three legged stool, because most of the original documents on which we were to work were located in Special Collections at Boston University's Mugar Library, the senior editor was at Stanford, and my offices were at the King Center and at Emory University in Atlanta. When I joined the Project in 1986, indeed within his own lifetime (1929-1968), it was already known that there were issues about originality in Dr. King's sermons and speeches.

What became increasingly clear as we worked through the papers from King's early career is that there were serious problems of plagiarism in his academic work. Tim Burke's colleague at Swarthmore , Allison Dorsey , was one of many graduate students at Stanford and Emory who did the fine tooth combing of the secondary sources that King wove into his own compositions. What became clear was that they were a patchwork of his own language and the language of scholars, often without clear attribution. If anything, the pattern seemed to be that the more familiar King was with a subject, the less likely he was to plagiarize. On matters that were fairly alien to his experience, he borrowed heavily from others and often with only the slightest wink of attribution. To take two extreme examples, an autobiographical paper,"Autobiography of Religious Development" has no significant plagiarism in it; his paper on"The Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism," however, is composed almost exclusively of paragraphs lifted from the best secondary sources available to him. Moreover, the further King went in his academic career, the more deeply ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation seemed to be, by then, the product of his long established practice.

When word of our findings leaked to the press, it appeared first in England and only later in the American press. It was, for several days, very big news indeed. Our five minutes of infamy waned and scholarly reflection took over. Boston University convened a panel to assess the situation. It concluded that there were serious problems with King's dissertation, made note of that, and concluded, nonetheless, that his doctorate should not be revoked. There were dissenting voices about that. Garry Wills, for one, argued that there was no statute of limitations on plagiarism. Neither death, nor Nobelity , nor immortality conferred immunity from the consequences of academic theft, he said. Boston should have revoked the doctorate.

Still, after all these years, in spite of many very important books and articles about Martin Luther King, there is much yet to be said about his plagiaries. For one thing, King's academic plagiarism deepened as he moved from being a very young college student at Morehouse , to a seminary student at Crozier , and finally a graduate student at Boston. He entered Morehouse at 15, a consequence of aggressive parental promotion and an early admissions program at the college to fill seats vacated by World War II's draft. His record at Morehouse was, altogether, rather mediocre and his teachers noted some carelessness in his papers. When he attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, it was King's first experience as a racial minority student in a largely white student body and his grades dramatically improved.

Two things, it seems to me, were going on. First, King was a charming young guy, intent on returning to his professors the kind of work they expected of him. They, in turn, recommended to him sources which they, themselves, most deeply respected. So, the roots of King's plagiary lie in one of our two expectations of students. We expect them to learn what the authorities have to say about a subject. He worked the authorities' words into a seamless construct of his own creation and told his professors almost exactly what they, themselves, believed about a subject. To be candid, aren't we most likely to reward students with good grades when they say what we believe, in our heart of hearts, about a subject? What was lacking in King's academic work was the other thing which we commonly ask of students: originality of thought. To be candid, originality of thought is rare in any student, rare enough, even, in scholarship. We say we value it, but I suspect that originality of thought, if or when it raises an abrupt head, is fairly threatening to us.

The other thing that I think was going on, particularly in King's later academic career, was that he was being patronized by his liberal, white professors. That clearly was not the case when his undergraduate teachers at Morehouse evaluated his work. But when he went to predominately white institutions in the North, King received extra-ordinarily high grades for academic work which was not only often heavily plagiarized, but was otherwise quite unexceptional. There's probably no way to prove that King was being patronized, but I think that, in the context of the time, the temptation to over-reward a charming young African American student who told his liberal white professors in the North almost exactly what he knew they already deeply believed about a subject was simply overwhelming.

The tensions between valuing knowing what the authorities have said about a subject and producing a work of original thought came to a head in King's dissertation."A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman " is a sort of workman-like product, plagued with plagiarism, but passable if you're not paying attention. It is, however, no original contribution to scholarship. Isn't that what we say that we expect a dissertation to be? The reason that Martin Luther King's dissertation is of only historical interest is because it is all so predictable. He sets out, as an advocate of personalism , the theological persuasion of his mentors, to assess Paul Tillich's and Henry Nelson Wieman's doctrines of God. Boston personalism held that ultimate reality was personal. Tillich and Wieman were the most prominent spokesmen of their time for doctrines of God holding that ultimate reality was not personal. King's conclusion, that the doctrines of God in Tillich and Wieman , were flawed because they held that ultimate reality was impersonal was something altogether predictable by the terms of their premises. There was simply nothing new, interesting, or surprising there, at all.

I might conclude that none of this was fatal for King's career as a preacher and powerful public speaker. Had he pursued an academic career, his heavy reliance on the authorities, often without citing them, could have been fatal. But in preaching, perhaps even in most public speech, genuine originality is more often fatal. A congregation, even a public audience, expects to hear and responds to the word once delivered to the fathers [and mothers]. It is the familiar that resonates with us. The original sounds alien and tends to alienate. The familiar, especially the familiar that appeals to the best in us, is what we long to hear. So,"I Have A Dream" was no new vision; it was a recension , quite literally, of his own"An American Dream." And that dream, as we know, already had a long history. King's vision was, perhaps, more inclusive than earlier dreams, but it appealed to us because we already believed it.

More Comments:

Joey johnson - 6/8/2005.

<"Just because there is neither common law nor statutory law aimed against plagiarism does not imply that it is not wrong. .......Cheating on one's spouse is in almost no state illegal. >" I know I am getting this article off topic, but I have to say that adultery is illegal in at least 11 states. Although the penalty is not enforced for it, it is still on the books as a crime. Also, the reason plagiarism is not in common law is because nowhere near the number of people today were writing and reading when common law was popping up. There has been no new common law for over 200 years. The reason plagiarism is not codified as a crime is because plagiarism causes no physical harm to the victim and there is no monetary theft. Thus goes the difference between something illegal and something unethical. Also, US Code Title 17, which is the copyright section, kind of puts plagiarism into a body of law. I would look specifically at "Section 1006. Entitlement to royalty payments" and "Section 801. Copyright arbitration royalty panels: Establishment and purpose" before making claims that plagiarism is not in some form of statutory law.

Using Luker's philosophy that a speech-giver is a plagiarizer because he had read and used secondary sources to prepare the speech, makes me realize that all my old college professors--including myself--are nothing more than a plagiarizer! How many of our lectures are original? How many of our lectures are not based on secondary sources? Goodwin and Ambrose got lambasted because they did not use quotation marks even though they cited their sources and comments with footnotes. Just as their attacks are petty, so too is any accusation about someone's speech, especially someone who is no longer around to defend himself. If it is not written down somewhere and sounds in the speech as though it came from somewhere else, it cannot rightly be called plagiarism. The more we all write and read, the more we all increase the chance of sounding very similar. And it is not impossible for more than one person to have identical thoughts and opinions!

Ralph E. Luker - 12/30/2004

Professor Jones, If you had bothered to read what I said, you'd see that I said that cases of plagiarism that are charged under legal codes commonly are brought as violations of copyright. I cannot see that anyone you've said here challenges what I had already written.

Professor Johnson, You haven't thought this through very carefully. 1) It makes all the difference in the world _how_ you use _both_ primary and secondary sources. 2) According to _your_ "philosophy", everyone who is dead is immune to criticism because they're not around to defend themselves any longer. So much for doing history!

Jonathan Dresner - 12/25/2004

We could write a book on the precise definition of plagiarism. There is, for example, a general exemption from the requirement of footnoting for using ideas or facts which are "common knowledge" which includes common-sense definitions for common words My definition of plagiarism was my own phrasing, though based of course on the common-sense academic understanding of source use and footnoting, and I had no idea that I was echoing the words of so many others; in fact, the reason I wrote my own definition in those words is that I hadn't run across a similarly compact and complete definition at the point at which I wrote it. Syllabi, as well, often contain material that, if it were in an academic paper, might qualify as plagiarized, because we are required (increasingly) to include certain standard phrases and passages. But the syllabus, like the catalog, honor code, plagiarism policy, etc., is a procedural and policy document, not a scholarly (or journalistic) one. In fact, the very notion of "best practice" in teaching (or anything) suggests a certain amount of copying, imitation, etc.

Stop hitting the submit button after the first time? Seriously, though, I don't know what causes these multiple postings. Fortunately, the HNN gremlins can clean them up if they spot them before people comment on multiple versions of a comment.

John H. Lederer - 12/25/2004

Precisely -- so the definition of plagiarism (or at least wrongful plagiarism) must involve something more. What is it? ========== Please excuse my multiple postings of the same message. I am apaprently doing something wrong, but am unsure what....suggestions gratefully received.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/25/2004

Mr. Lederer, If you were to look more fully, you'll find that student honor codes, handbooks, guides to research, manuals of style, etc., are among the most commonly plagiarized of documents. A part of the reason is the understandable need for common understandings of the rules. The lawyers understand that very well -- and themselves generally agree on not re-inventing wheels.

Mr. Appell, I suspect that if you knew more about the subject than you do we'd have a little more nuanced statement from you.

Treacherous waters indeed. If I put your definition of "plagiarism" into quotes and google it, I get 71 hits, most of which appear to be from other university's honor codes. As you say "most definitions..include", but I would suggest that the idea and indeed the very words (given the same word order) were likely copied. So...there has to be something more to a definition of plagiarism, presumably something to do with the context. We would say, assuming that plagiarism codes are not simply a mass of plagiarism, that it is OK for another university to copy your definition of "plagiarism", but not OK to copy something different -- your notes on Chinese history, for example. A common saying is "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it", sometimes attributed to George Santayanna. Yet most translations of Thucydides I have looked at have the core of that idea in Thucydides's Introduction. When did plagiarism occur-- with Santayanna, or with Thucydides and some nameless Greek teacher of Thucydides? Some have argued that we never have original ideas, just further developments of old ideas.

brad t appell - 12/25/2004

Who cares? No one did more to advance the cause of moral values in this country. He got stabbed, beaten and eventually shot to death for his cause. If he plagiarized I could care less.

I could be mistaken about this, but I believe that most plagiarism cases filed under civil law are a) treated as violations of copyright and b) settled out of court. There are big areas that may be considered plagiarism but are problemmatic as violations of copyright.

Derek Charles Catsam - 12/25/2004

John -- Just because there is neither common law nor statutory law aimed against plagiarism does not imply that it is not wrong. Law is one outlet, and an imperfect one, for capturing what society deems as right or wrong. Cheating on one's spouse is in almost no state illegal. Does that mean there is no implied immorality or other form of wrongness attached to it? Of course if one seels a book heavily plagiarized from other sources, one could wondeer if fraud laws would not come into play, but I havenever seen such a case occur. Perhaps we also ought to consider civil law, a realm in which plagiarizers have in fact been nailed. dc

Jonathan Dresner - 12/24/2004

Most definitions of plagiarism that I'm familiar with include, as mine does , the idea that using other people's ideas or research without attribution is a form of intellectual dishonesty. It doesn't have the same force of law as patent protection, but the idea that a person should get due credit for their original ideas and labors is one of the cornerstones of modern academic practice. Insofar as there is a concept of "honor" in the academy, that has to be one of its chief applications.

John H. Lederer - 12/24/2004

My thought -- or at least a part of it, was that King's "I have a dream" speech was not in an academic context. If anything the context was that of a preacher delivering a sermon. In such a context, perhaps plagiarism does not exist.. but I do agree with you that ir dimishes King's role in intellectual history. And, of course, the plagiarism in his thesis is in the academic context. Dresner's two paragraphs do raise a second interesting issue. Copyright violations require using nearly identical words. It is a copying of a particular expression of an idea. The idea itself is unprotected. A paraphrase cannot be a copyright violation. Does "plagiarism" extend to ideas, or a more generalized concept of the statement of an idea? Note that such an extension can be very treacherous waters... a standard response for why copyright law does not violate freedom of speech is that one is at liberty to express the idea, one my not just use the identical wording, and this achieves the political purpose of freedom of speech.

But the second book would probably sell better. Look at John Gray's work, for example, which takes the work of Carol Gilligan and others on gender, relationship roles and language and reduces them to sixth grade language. He's made a fortune, and I've never seen a footnote in any of his works. Call me a footnote fetishist, if you must (I'd settle for a bibliography), but there's hardly anything original (I never saw anything, and it's hard to tell when he won't distinguish between his ideas and his predecessors) in Gray's work, and he steadfastly refuses to acknowledge his intellectual debts. He's not interested in academic credit, but I still consider his writings to be both ungrateful and deceptive. You see similar kinds of writing by students: paraphrasing an academic source which addresses the question without adding anything original of their own. I still struggle with explaining to students why that's a problem, but most of the time when I ask questions for essays that isn't a good way to answer the question.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/24/2004

As I indicated, the unattributed use of other people's words and/or ideas happens very commonly in public speech, where it is often distracting to say, for example: "As Amos said, 'Let justice roll down like waters ....'" There are, even, other fields in which plagiarism is common and not believed to be wrongful, as in legal rulings. In these cases, there seems to be a "common treasury" of language from which we borrow at will. I even did it myself, without quotation marks, in the the blog post you are commenting on when I wrote of "the word once delivered to the fathers". I'm fairly sure that that language is not originally my own, though Google gives me no other citation for it. Nonetheless, when we do it, it does not magnify our role as originators or creators of original language or thought. In that sense, at least, the findings of plagiarism in the papers, sermons, and speeches of Martin Luther King do have a tendency to undermine any place he might otherwise have in American intellectual history. (And, I have to say that it distresses me when the consequences of using other people's language without attribution results in a hilarity such as the Southern Poverty Law Center's monument on which "Let justice roll down like waters ..." is attributed to King, as if no one ever before him had ever said such a thing.) My response to your first query has implications for the second. Whether a paraphrase or borrowing of a metaphor is wrongful to the extent that it could be found a violation of law in court is, in some ways, beside the point. A scrupulously careful paraphraser might publish an entire book which is, even, paragraph by paragraph derivative of another book. The paraphraser might _still_ escape any legal finding of theft. Nonetheless, the academic community ought in that case to conclude that the work is of no value.

Intellectual property "crimes" -- copyright, patent, etc. are statutory wrongs, not common law wrongs. They are violations of state granted monopolies, not "theft" as that is commonly understood, RIAA's advertising notwithstanding. The lack of common law support suggests that no consensus exists that they are morally wrong (Thomas Jefferson offers the most standard moral defense in his candle analogy). Plagiarism is not even a statutory wrong. Unless it rises to a copyright or tradename violation, it is purely an "academic" wrong -- a violation of the formal or informal mores of academic and related life. Plagiarim is usually deemed a wrong by the public when the intent is to make the author seem more learned or intelligent than he is, e.g. Sen. Biden's plagiarism to make him seem an international relations wonk, or a student's copying of someone else's work to get a better grade. Query 1: King's "I have a dream" speech is not in the academic field, and is not, I think, an attempt to burnish King's image. Instead it is an attempt to influence an audience. In that circumstance can there be wrongful plagiarism? Query 2: Copyright requires aan almost word for word copying. Plagiarism is often extended to include the use of someone else's ideas without attribution, e.g. a papraphrase or even less. Is plagiarism in that sense sufficiently well defined so that a meaningful determination of a violation can be made? Should that extended sense of plagiarism be wrong? Is King's use of someone else's metaphor and analogies wrong?

Does anyone care that you can't spell?

greg childs - 12/24/2004

Nobody cares that King was a plagerist. But people know that he was a great man.

chris l pettit - 12/23/2004

I would reply that it would depend on your philosophical stance. Personally? In print it would qualify as blatant plagiarism...and he most certainly should have credited the source from which he copied...you, I and Dr. Dresner are completely in agreement that there is no gray area here. I just wanted to dig a bit deeper into his reasons for including the quote, the context in which it was lifted and included, what (including self interest) would be MLKs reasoning for not giving credit, and the general philosophical potholes that underlie any discussion of plagiarism. I reiterate that I am in full agreement that the quote that you cite should qualify as plagiarism and that credit should have been given where due. I just am wondering why we think this way and where the perimeters are drawn and for what reasons. I also wanted to question whether, as Dr. Dresner started to touch upon, the vision and general ideals that someone is standing for can override a failure in scholarship, or whether that failure in scholarship somehow takes away from the authenticity and quality of the message that is being articulated. I would state that unless the plagiarism is widespread and blatant, and that the fundamental tenets of the message were actually about increasing one's own profile and self interest, instead of helping others and promoting peace and human rights, the errors in scholarship can be noted, but not given any great weight. MLK was certainly one who believed in human rights and peace, and was not out solely for his own benefit. In the narrow area of debating his scholarship...yes, his credibility is weakened, but do we think of MLK as a great scholar or a great humanitarian? I personally look at him as a beacon for human rights and peace, and consider his scholarship (or errors in that scholarship) to be secondary. I honestly think that you, I and Dr. Dresner are completely in agreement but may just be talking on a couple of different wavelengths... Happy Holidays Fellas...may they be filled with peace and joy. CP www.wicper.org

Richard Henry Morgan - 12/22/2004

Since we're coming up on Christmas, and anniversaries are often considered news, a note from someone like you, Ralph, on Harry T. Moore and his legacy (a courthouse in Brevard is now named after him) might be well-received. Mims has traditionally been the most redneck area of Brevard, with an historically large KKK membership. I once interviewed a guy there with an "I Ride With Forrest" sticker on his truck, and he told me there was some sort of migratory pipeline from West Virginia to Mims. I don't know if that has been researched much.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/22/2004

Chris, I'm not sure that I'm understand you correctly. Do you mean that there is no difference between saying: 1) Right here in Montgomery, Let justice roll down like waters; and righteousness like a mighty stream. and saying: 2) Right here in Montgomery, "Let justice roll down like waters; and righteousness like a mighty stream." Of course, in the spoken sermon or public speech, there is no difference. In the published version, there should be.

Jonathan Dresner - 12/22/2004

Mr. Pettit, You wrote that "this takes nothing away from his vision and scholarship." While I agree with you about the former (though his debt to Gandhi is often underestimated in this regard as well), it is the latter which is at issue here. The pattern of textual appropriation which Ralph describes does indeed detract from King's scholarship, as it is fundamentally at odds with modern standards of academic integrity. Yes, there are gray areas, but this just isn't one of them.

chris l pettit - 12/22/2004

I was actually meaning to agree with your post, which I did read. I just wanted to expand the discussion somewhat. It just seems to me that our interpretations of what Dr. King wrote will necessarily cloud and make unique our ideas of what was plagiarised and what was not. THis is not to say that he did not plagiarise...but rather to suggest that maybe we are criticising his failure to cite others, not his taking of their ideas. If you want a different viewpoint, you can go with what Richard suggested...that everything is original as it happens in a totally unique and individual reality. The countless relationships that lead to my posting this comment have never happened and will never happen again. In fact, this sentence has a different originality than the last one I wrote due to the fact that it is affected by the last sentence. In that sense, everything is original and we can have no complaints whatsoever about plagiarism since the circumstances surrounding the meaning and interpretation of what is supposedly plagiarised will be different (maybe not substantially) from their "original" usage due to the fact that it is a totally different stream of consciousness. I know this is uncomfortable for those who want to think that their actually are independent entities in the world, but sadly that idea does not hold up to logical and rational scrutiny. I agree with you about Dr. King's plagiarism and wish that he would have been more careful citing his sources. However, at least for me, this takes nothing away from his vision and scholarship, as we all have imperfections in our work, way of living, etc. it just comes with being human. In another vein...I always cite as many sources as possible and believe that the footnotes in a text are usually more interesting and important than the text itself. I refuse to be one of those arrogant professors who is silly enough to believe that I have anything extraordinary to bestow on the world. It is up to others to decide in their capacities, and I have never taken awards or honors to mean anything other than others found it agreeable in their realities to honor me in a given moment. it says nothing about my scholarship overall...which is really irrelevant given that there is no objective reality in which everyone will agree that I am some fantastic prof or something. I am simply trying to demonstrate ideas and concepts that others can use in their realities to come to the conclusions that they will come to. It is all a big system and I merely want to play my part. CP www.wicper.org

Greg James Robinson - 12/22/2004

I agree that Ralph's post is much to the point. The evidence that King expanded his practice of plagiarism as he progressed academically is indeed disturbing, as is his success at it. Clearly, nobody was on their guard and questioning where a charming young African American student could have absorbed so much information about Mahayana Buddhism. It is no doubt akin to Alex Haley's success at ducking responsibility for plagiarism and fabrications, as Philip Nobile has shown in his compelling research. (I discovered some years ago that Job Ben Solomon, an 18 century slave author and biographical subject, had told of Juffure and of being sold into slavery and sent from Gambia to Annapolis, which confirmed for me that Kunta Kinte had to be copied.) It is an object lesson for us white professors not to be overgenerous with African American students, simply out of fear of building on discrimination. I can't help but think of what would have happened if King's plagiarism had been discovered in full during his lifetime, but then Helen Keller seems to have emerged with her future reputation intact from the scandal of her plagiarism of a children's book. In any case, while I am glad that Ralph's post has fostered such serious self-examination by my colleagues here, I think that it is possible for us as professors to take too much responsibility on ourselves for plaigarism. I do not expect my students to repeat back to me what I have said; if anything, I make a point of being generous whenever possible with the works of students who present positions with which I disagree. Similarly, King's actions demonstrate the fallacy of the old saw that taking one author's ideas is plagiarism, and taking many author's ideas is research; rather, the copying of others's language is the tangible sign of knowingly appropriating their ideas. I have just learned from a Chinese colleague that cheating, including plagiarism, is rampant in China. There are thus presumably larger forced at work here than just a failure of our own society.

Anthony Grafton of Princeton has written an amusing little book on the history of the footnote -- I think it has a useful bibliography on associated questions surrounding the history of attribution.

I confess to having watched the wall-to-wall coverage of the 1952 Republican and Democratic conventions on television. They really were interesting to watch before the public relations experts seized control of everything and so sanitized them that there isn't very much interesting to see or hear at major party political conventions any more. I suspect that CBS or NBC has a viewable version of Carey's speech, tho no one has dug it out yet and played it alongside King's speech for comparison. The Goldwater letter is an interesting find.

David T. Beito - 12/21/2004

Did you see it on televison? I always wondered if a copy of that speech has been preserved on film and how his delivery compared with that of King. Interestingly, Carey received several fan letter after the speech. One was from a little known city councilman in Phoenix named Barry Goldwater.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/21/2004

Thanks, David. I'm not sure we know how it happened. I don't recall whether we know whether Carey's speech was published somewhere or not. There seems little doubt about King's lifting some of Carey's rhetoric from that 1952 speech. It is possible that MLK heard it the same way I did. He may have seen it on television. King would have been 23 years old when Carey gave that speech. He would have graduated from seminary, been in his early graduate school years, and at home for the summer to serve as assistant pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, his father's congregation. MLK, Sr., was a Republican and it is highly likely that King Sr. and Jr. would have been gathered around the television set for Carey's address.

Ralph: A thoughtful piece. Have you ever looked into the story of how and why King apparently took part of his "I have a Dream Speech" from one delivered by Archibald Carey Jr. When I was looking through Carey's papers for the bio of T.R.M. Howard, I found a copy of Carey's speech (which was to the the Republican National Convention in 1952) and saw some of striking parallels in wording especially to the closing section of King's speech.

Very good question, Manan. I'm not exactly sure when source citations as annotations first begin appearing western texts. Two key moves are at play, I think. One is individualistic capitalism's deepening commitment to notions of private property rights, even private property in language and, what is more difficult, in ideas. The other, I think, is the development of the seminar in German universities, first, and its expansion elsewhere. It emphasized both the learning of what authorities have said, which as you suggest is at the heart of even pre-modern forms of learning (and still prevails in many traditional societies), and the value of original thought. Maybe clear attribution developed, for one thing, as a way of distinguishing the latter from the former. In other words, you attribute what you have learned from others and your non-attributed text stakes your claim to what is original in your work. We still obviously do value exact reproduction of older texts, but they are then hedged in by quotation marks or indentation. Those particular conventions still are awkward for popular texts, whether it's a sermon or a work of popular history. Attribution can be intrusive in telling a moving story, so when even I preach and say "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream" I may or may not pause to attribute those words to Amos. In a society with an attenuating hold on its literary sources, my audience may vaguely recall that as sounding right and, thus, it resonates; but there is now the possibility that someone or many ones will think that Martin Luther King or Ralph Luker originally said it.

Manan Ahmed - 12/21/2004

Ralph, great post. My question is more about the academy. When did the notion of attribution and originality become normalized in western academy? Is this a 20th c. phenomenon? In pre-modern societies we had the opposite emphasis on exact and error-free reproduction and the modes of knowledge still exist that privilige that. I am thinking here specifically of religious texts within the Indo-Persianate culture. Your post reminded me of another religious speaker Maududi who left journalism (and the academy) at the turn of the century in India because of calls that his work was too "original" and didn't adhere to the standard of exact quotation and supporting of pre-existing knowledge. After he became an established political leader and intellectual, there were several calls to take away his seminary qualifications because he had not fulfilled them properly - mostly to no avail.

Chris, If you bothered to read what I said, you'd recall that I said that genuine originality is rare. If you looked at the heavily annotated published papers of MLK, you'd see for yourself that many of his academic papers, including the dissertation, were heavily plagiarized by any definition of the meaning of the word plagiarism. Look for yourself and watch out for the risks of your own patronage.

Good question, which may be impossible of a completely satisfying answer, but there are suggestive clues. At Morehouse, King's grades averaged no better than about a C+. That, despite the fact that his father was a member of the college's board of trustees and a well known figure in the college community. King's application to attend Yale Divinity School was rejected. At Crozer, a much less competitive school, King's grades averaged about an A- and he graduated with two awards from the faculty: one as "the outstanding member of his class" and the other of $1,200 toward graduate study. No one has done a comparative transcript study. I'm not sure that one coud be done and I'm not sure that King graduated with the highest average in his class, but he would have been close to it. At Boston, where too many graduate students were admitted to allow careful attention by professors, King had a record comparable to that at Crozer -- except for a crisis semester, in which he had a couple of academic disasters, including failing a language exam.

Richard Henry Morgan - 12/21/2004

A lot of our thoughts aren't particularly original. Some of our self-regarding thoughts are original -- I daresay that nobody in history has had the thought that I'm typing this message at this point in time. And in between is a whole host of thoughts that are either original, or whose proof is original. Often it is only the proof offered that is original -- Fermat had the thought, as had people before him, but only recently was it proven. Taking ideas of others is problematic to establish when the ideas are of such common coin as to elude a determination of origin. Expression of ideas can often be less problematic. I think you'll find, Chris, that MLK took others' words and presented them as his own, without attribution, including part of a dissertation completed under the same dissertation director by another student just a few years before. Ralph explained that the school had exploded in enrolment, the professors juggling too many balls at once, so that the fact that the professor missed that is perhaps explicable by reasons other than timidity or laziness or patronizing behavior or politics. I doubt MLK would have done this had he any academic ambitions -- he just wanted to learn and jump through the hoops, and get that 'Dr.' in front of his name for career purposes.

chris l pettit - 12/21/2004

while a disagree with the idea of plagiarism... have you ever given thought to the FACT that nothing any of us say is original or has never been thought or siad before? The idea that any of us have any sort of idividual thought as though we were some sort of separate and independent entity is not only absurd, but absolutely indefensible from a logical standpoint. Everything that I say has been affected by those who have taught me, my readings, my surrounding environment, my students, and my colleagues. it is not my own...it comes from all of them. i am merely a product of the interconnectedness that we all share as part of the academic environment. That being said...if you blatantly quote someone and copy their exact words...you should give them credit. But if you consider plagiarism to be the practice of taking the ideas of others and making them your own...even submitting them as your own...we are all plagiarists and plagiarism ceases to have any meaning. Our ideas are not our own. I really don;t wish to get into a religious discussion regarding how it is impossible to argue logically the existence of a soul and that we are nothing but products of our relationships with one another and the environment, but that may be where we are headed on this issue. I find MLK's taking of others ideas and incorporating them into his philosophy and ideology to be perfectly fine. If he presents anything as an original thought, he is wrong of course...but so is anyone who presents anything as a truly original thought, as such things are not logically possible for it would mean that the entity would necessarily have to exist without any interaction with any other entity to claim to have come to a thought with any originality. And then the entity could not share they thought because in the sharing of the thought, the thought would necessarily be altered by the perception of those receiving the thought, and would cease to be original. I suppose I am just saying be careful with your terms and exactly what you are claiming. If he blatanly copied someone's work...ok, there is a problem there...but if he simply incorporated an idea into his work...no matter how blatantly similar that idea is...well, then those in glass houses should not cast stones. CP www.wicper.org

Jonathan Dresner - 12/21/2004

Have you, or anyone else that you know of, actually examined the question of King's grades relative to the grades of the people around him? It seems to me that a part of the question of whether he was being patronized or given a pass would hinge on a comparison with other people doing similar quality work as well as other people getting similar grades (they may or may not be strongly overlapping sets; if they are, then it weakens the case that his professors were treating him differently).

• Articles -- Free Samples
• How Martin Luther King, Jr. Got Away . . .

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

[2005 Note: This document is no longer on-line. Substitiute this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King%2C_Jr._-_authorship_issues ]

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. . . .

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).

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The Theses of Martin Luther King, Jr.

N ews stories of recent months underscore the fact that the place of Martin Luther King, Jr. in our national mythology is still not secure. Perhaps that should not surprise us. Myth-making in a nation so large and various as ours takes time. In that light, the twenty-three years since Dr. King’s death is not a long time. It may not be bad that we are slow to elevate a historical figure to the status of national exemplar. When we so elevate a figure, we are saying something not only about that person but about ourselves. Among the many things that make us who we are, we are whom we admire and teach our children to emulate.

In 1983, Congress declared Martin Luther King Day to be a national holiday. Aside from the immediate effect of closing federal offices for a day, such an act of Congress is a recommendation, a statement of hope that people will agree that we recognize our better angels in the person and work of Dr. King. As with other national holidays, the observance of Dr. King Day is spotty. It has been a long time since national holidays were observed with any hint that they might be civil holy days. Just as well, some say, arguing that “civil religion” is a very dubious enterprise. Yes, but a society needs something like public piety—common symbols, stories, and rites that evoke respect, even reverence (although never worship).

Congress was right in what it did. It was not, as some claim, throwing a sop to black Americans; it was raising a sign for all Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr. advanced a thesis about America. A thesis is, first of all, a proposition. Dr. King proposed that legalized racial discrimination contradicted fundamental propositions of the American experiment. Of course he was not the first to say that. But he said it with an almost singular power of persuasion. And, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, he acted on it in a manner that would, in time, catch the conscience of the citizenry.

With remarkable, although not unfailing, consistency, he channeled anger into the ways of peaceful protest within the context of democratic deliberation. He made clear that his dream was a dream of and for America, not against America. He called us to be the people we professed to be. Most Americans listened to his thesis, and knew he was right. Some of those who view history in the light of providential purpose did not hesitate to acclaim him as God’s instrument. Not since the Civil War had Americans been so compelled to face the most abiding sin of their corporate history. If one can speak of countries having souls. Dr. King led this country to something like repentance and amendment of life, or at least to nobler resolve.

Yet Dr. King and the day set aside to honor his memory remain, as they say, controversial. The reasons are not hard to find. We reject the claim that it is the only reason while readily acknowledging that one reason is racism. It is not only in the recognized fever swamps of extremism that one encounters Americans who never listened to Dr. King, or listened to him and strongly disagreed. They believe that blacks are inherently inferior and constitute a population basically alien to this society. In their view, laws of racial segregation were neither irrational nor unjust. Even if no other questions had subsequently been raised about Dr. King, these Americans would not honor his memory or celebrate his day. Racism may not be the main reason, but it is surely one reason, and it can in devious ways infect other reasons.

M any Americans are no doubt ambivalent about Dr. King because they are ambivalent about the current form of the civil rights movement that is associated with his name. Already in his lifetime, advocates of “black power” countered white racism with black racism, contending that blacks are indeed alien to an inherently oppressive “Amerika.” Today, with significant gradations of stridency, many black leaders who claim the mantle of Dr. King perpetuate that poisonous line of unreason.

The very term “civil rights” has come to be understood not as a cause opening America to a larger and more generous sense of community but as a militantly fraudulent form of special pleading. Thus, for example, in the last Congress the Civil Rights Restoration Act was roundly, and rightly, criticized as the Racial Preference Act. The thesis of Dr. King has been turned into its antithesis. Most Americans do not take well to quotas and reverse discriminations designed to give additional advantage to those blacks who are already doing well. They are disgusted with racialist leaders who adamantly press for such measures while ignoring, denying, or excusing the desperate plight of an isolated black underclass, especially in our urban centers.

The racism of the right, against which Dr. King contended, is familiar. Not so readily recognized are the more recent manifestations of the racism of the left. Much pro-abortion agitation about the “crisis” of teenage pregnancy thinly veils a desire to control and, if possible, reduce the black population—especially the lower part of the population that may turn out to be a “drain” on society. The leaders of the public school establishment are determined to perpetuate a destructive educational system to which they would not subject their own children but which is good enough for “them.” “Progressive” hiring and tenure policies in universities are based on the assumption that “they” cannot meet “our” standards, and therefore compromises must be made in the name of affirmative action.

These and other measures are advanced under the vague rubric of “civil rights.” The result is the opposite of Dr. King’s thesis that people should be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The result is that many whites, and not a few blacks, are ambivalent about celebrating Dr. King because they, wrongly, identify him with a civil rights ideology that has made a mockery of the movement that he led.

Powerfully reinforcing these reservations are the questions raised about Dr. King’s own character. That he was a philanderer, indulging himself in frequent adulterous relationships, now seems to be established beyond reasonable doubt. This aspect of his character was apparently well known to some who worked closely with him, and has become quite public in recent years. Now another thesis of Dr. King is being widely discussed, his doctoral thesis written at the School of Theology at Boston University. It seems that large sections of the thesis, and much of King’s earlier and later writings, were “borrowed” from others without attribution. The unavoidable word for that is plagiarism.

The revelations about Dr. King’s doctoral thesis do not touch his claim to historical greatness. While a few writers have contended that Dr. King was a scholar and theologian of note, this was generally recognized as hagiographical excess. Strangely enough, however, some among his more distinguished biographers have said that they are shaken by the finding of plagiarism. They were not similarly shaken by his sexual behavior. After all, many great men have been philanderers, but plagiarism is something else. Plagiarism is much more serious than adultery, that is, if your primary universe of discourse is the academy. Plagiarism is a knowledge-class sin. To understand this is to understand why Dr. King’s plagiarism was so prominently featured in the prestige media in a way that his adulteries were not.

S ome commentators took a different tack in response to the most recent findings. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, editorially opined that journalistic explorations into the private lives of public figures have gotten out of hand. The editors compared the attention paid the King disclosures with the exposes that undid Gary Hart, John Tower, and others in recent years. The comparison does not hold. At stake with Hart was his aspiration to be president, and the Tower question was whether he was qualified to be secretary of defense. At stake with Dr. King is whether he should be enshrined and celebrated as an exemplary figure in the telling of the American story. Moreover, the comparison does not hold because a doctoral thesis is not a private act. Perhaps most important, the comparison does not hold because Dr. King was a minister of the gospel.

The significance of the last point generally escapes those who have crafted the public telling of the King legend. A few days following his death in April 1968, a memorial service was held in New York at a large Harlem church. On network news, a reporter standing in front of the church concluded his report with this: “It was a religious service, and fittingly so, for, after all. Dr. King was the son of a minister.” The son of a minister? Dr. King never left any doubt that he understood himself and his movement in terms of Christian teaching and ministry. The public secularization of the King legend has everything to do with the secularistic propensities of our cultural elites. Yet another factor is at work, however.

Even some of those who recognize that Dr. King cannot be explained apart from his religious milieu and self-understanding seem to think that the usual standards for clerical behavior do not apply to the black church. Compare, for instance, the sensationalistic media treatment of white televangelists caught in sexual dalliance. Long and lasciviously, the media slaver over the manifest “hypocrisy” of a Jimmy Swaggart. Dr. King’s sexual derelictions, on the other hand, are discreetly ignored, or even welcomed as evidence that he was not one of those awkward types derisively referred to as “saints.” (The last was the relieved observation of The Nation in response to the King exposures.)

Why this nonchalance toward Dr. King’s moral transgressions? One answer is that Dr. King was on the right side of a great and just cause. Another and less attractive answer is the supposition that we shouldn’t expect as much of blacks. The people who are accepting of Dr. King’s moral failings are, as often as not, the same people who tell us that black rap groups that draw their language from the sewer are “representative of authentic black culture.” The “acceptance” professed by so many of a progressive bent is, in fact, a condescension riddled through and through with racialist stereotypes.

The truth is that for millions of Christians, black and white, there is the perception that Dr. King betrayed their trust. If he is to be accused of hypocrisy, however, it was the hypocrisy defined as the homage that vice pays to virtue. Unlike so many others in the sixties, he did not commend his failings as an “alternative lifestyle.” He knew that he was a sinner, and we can hope that he knew he was a forgiven sinner.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is rightly honored as a hero in the telling of the American story—not because of his personal virtue but because he was the chosen instrument to advance a morally imperative change in our common life. His character was grievously flawed. He was, to borrow from Saint Paul, an “earthen vessel”—a very earthen vessel. For believers this only underscores the truth that, as the Apostle says, “the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.” We have little doubt that Dr. King would agree with that. And we have little doubt that he would further agree that the thesis he sought to advance needs still to be championed today—against those who opposed him then, as well as against those who fraudulently claim his legacy now. Dr. King, we expect, would not be at all surprised that he and his thesis continue to be cause for controversy.

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Plagiarism Seen by Scholars In King's Ph.D. Dissertation

By Anthony de Palma

• Nov. 10, 1990

Torn between loyalty to his subject and to his discipline, the editor of the papers of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reluctantly acknowledged yesterday that substantial parts of Dr. King's doctoral dissertation and other academic papers from his student years appeared to have been plagiarized.

The historian, Clayborne Carson, a professor of history at Stanford University who was chosen in 1985 by Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, to head the King Papers Project, said that analysis of the papers by researchers working on the project had uncovered concepts, sentences and longer passages taken from other sources without attribution throughout Dr. King's writings as a theology student.

"We found that there was a pattern of appropriation, of textual appropriation," said the 46-year-old historian, who was active in the civil rights movement and has written extensively on black history. He spoke at a news conference at Stanford, called after an article in The Wall Street Journal yesterday disclosed details of the project's findings. "By the strictest definition of plagiarism -- that is, any appropriation of words or ideas -- there are instances of plagiarism in these papers." A Lack of Answers

Although he said that he believed Dr. King had acted unintentionally, Mr. Carson said that Dr. King had been sufficiently well acquainted with academic principles and procedures to have understood the need for extensive footnotes, and he was at a loss to explain why Dr. King had not used them.

Mr. Carson and other scholars who have seen the papers declined to say how great a percentage of the material had been plagiarized, but they said it was enough to indicate a serious violation of academic principles.

Officials at Boston University, which awarded Dr. King his doctorate in 1955, announced yesterday that a committee of four scholars had been formed to investigate the dissertation. But it is not likely, even if plagiarism is proved, that the Ph.D. degree in theology would be revoked, because neither Dr. King nor his dissertation adviser is alive to defend the work.

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Dr. martin luther king, jr. archive, finding aid and content.

View contents of this collection in Boston University ArchivesSpace

Download the Dr. King Collection finding aid and inventory [PDF]

About the Collection – Scope & Content Notes

The Martin Luther King, Jr. collection, donated in 1964, consists of manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, printed material, financial and legal papers, a small number of photographs and other items dating from 1947 to 1963.

Manuscripts include class notes, examinations and papers written by Dr. King while a student at Morehouse College (1944-1948), Crozer Theological Seminary (1948-1951) and Boston University (1951-1953). Among the notable documents are: a paper entitled Ritual (1947), composed at Morehouse; An Autobiography of Religious Development (1950), an assignment for the “Religious Development of Personality” class at Crozer taught by one of King’s mentors, George W. Davis; and notes and drafts of his doctoral dissertation, A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman (1955). Additional manuscripts in the collection include drafts of speeches, sermons and three books: Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Harper, 1958), about the 1955-1956 bus boycott; Strength to Love (Harper & Row, 1963), a collection of several of his best-known sermons including “A Knock at Midnight,” “Shattered Dreams,” “The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore,” and “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life;” and Why We Can’t Wait (Harper & Row, 1964), which includes the famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Dr. King’s office files, which date from 1955 to 1963, make up the bulk of the collection and consist primarily of letters, but also include itineraries, financial and legal documents, printed items, news clippings, and similar documents. There is material related to both the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Additionally, there are extensive files related to the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Other organizations which prominently figure include the American Friends Service Committee, which helped to finance Dr. King’s 1959 trip to India; the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA).

Notable correspondence from figures in the Civil Rights movement includes letters from Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell, Ella J. Baker, Medgar Evers, Roy Wilkins, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, William Sloane Coffin, Allan Knight Chalmers, Sidney Poitier, Jackie Robinson, A. Philip Randolph, Harry Belafonte, and Ralph Abernathy. Distinguished U.S. Government correspondents include Alabama Gov. John Patterson, Robert F. Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, Paul Douglas, Prescott Bush, Ralph Bunche, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Richard M. Nixon, Dean Rusk, Walter Reuther, Adlai Stevenson, Earl Warren, Harry S. Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Other eminent correspondents include James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Jawaharlal Nehru, Linus Pauling, Nat King Cole, Cass Canfield, Ralph Ginzburg, Julian Huxley, Paul Tillich, and Stanley Levison.

Photographs in the collection include images of King with his family and congregation, a formal portrait, a photograph of the knife with which he was stabbed in 1958, and his coffin being transported by airplane.

Awards for King in the collection include an honorary Doctor of Divinity diploma from the Chicago Theological Seminary (1957); a certificate from the Alabama Association of Women’s Clubs (1957); Man of the Year Award from the Capital Press Club (1957); the Social Justice Award from the Religion and Labor Foundation (1957); the New York City proclamation of May 16, 1961 as “Desegregation Day” in honor of King, by Mayor Robert Wagner (1961); a citation from Americans for Democratic Action (1961); a certificate from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (1963); an award from the Institute of Adult Education, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Bayonne, New Jersey (1964); and King’s certificate of membership in the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity at Boston University.

Audio in the collection includes recordings of King delivering a speech at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina (1958); an interview with Bayard Rustin (1963); King’s visit to Boston University in 1964 to donate his papers; King giving a speech at the Golden Jubilee Convention of the United Synagogues of America (Nov. 19, 1964); King speaking to District 65 DWA; and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Other items in the collection include telephone log books (1961–1963); King’s diary regarding his arrest on July 27, 1962; numerous clippings, pamphlets, flyers, articles, and other printed items; and a monogrammed leather briefcase owned by King. An addendum to the collection includes correspondence pertaining to the Joan Daves Agency’s dealings with King and the King Estate. These letters date from 1958 to 1993 and cover advertising and promotion, King’s Massey Lectures (1967), publishing rights, permissions, and other subjects.

Facsimiles of select materials are available on permanent display in the Martin Luther King Jr. Reading Room on the 3rd floor of the Mugar Memorial Library .

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American prophet: martin luther king, jr. public deposited.

• In August 2011, after more than two decades of planning, fund-raising and construction, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial— a four-acre tract south of the Mall featuring a granite statue of King — has opened to the public. King is officially enshrined in granite in the National Mall. A black preacher became a monument, a monument represents America. King is the prophet of American Civil Religion. This paper examines Martin Luther King, Jr. as the prophet of America and in the context of American Civil Religion. To begin, I will explore the concepts and definitions of the prophet, the civil religion, and the American Creed by analyzing Max Weber, Robert Bellah, Martin Marty, and Richard Hughes’s works. King’s thoughts, words and acts in the light of prophetic traditions and the Civil Religion will be further discussed. The concept of the Beloved Community will be the main clue in order to interpret King’s commitment to his social actions. King’s outlook on American Civil Religion will be sketched by analyzing the center concept of Civil Rights Movement, Anti-Vietnam War Campaign, as well as Poor People Campaign. Lastly, I will explore how King is recognized in the United States today by examining the establishment of King National Memorial in Washington D.C. and the speech of the president delivered at the dedication ceremony. Further, the link between King’s idea/actions and the Occupy movement in 2011, which is referred even by the president, will be discussed.
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Boston University

April 24, 1839

After graduating from  Crozer Theological Seminary  in 1951, Martin Luther King pursued his doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University’s graduate school. King’s desire to study at Boston University was influenced by his increasing interest in  personalism , a philosophy that emphasizes the necessity of personal religious experience in understanding God. Two of the country’s leading personalist theologians, Edgar S.  Brightman  and L. Harold  DeWolf ,   taught at Boston University and helped to refine King’s concept of the theory. King stated in his graduate application that Crozer professor and Boston University graduate Raymond Bean’s “great influence over me has turned my eyes toward his former school” ( Papers  1:390 ). 

At Boston University Brightman and DeWolf became King’s primary mentors. King also broadened his studies by taking several classes on the history of philosophy that examined the works of Reinhold  Niebuhr ,   Alfred North Whitehead, Plato, and Hegel. King’s tenure at Boston University culminated with the completion of his  dissertation , entitled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” Although King had not previously studied either  Tillich  or Wieman, he was interested in their denial of both the personality of God and of the possibility of personal knowledge of God, which contrasted greatly with his earlier studies of personalism. 

Outside the classroom King helped organize, and participated in, the Dialectical Society, a dozen African American theological students who met monthly to discuss philosophical and theological ideas and their application to the black situation in the United States. A classmate of King’s, W. T. Handy, described the group as “solving the problems of the world, politically, socially, and in the theological realm” ( Papers  2:161 ). King also delivered sermons at local churches and developed a reputation as a powerful preacher. 

Although King received satisfactory grades at Boston University, later analysis would reveal that many of King’s essays and his dissertation relied upon appropriated words and ideas for which he failed to provide adequate citations. King’s plagiarism escaped detection during his lifetime, and his professors had little reason to suspect him of such, based on his success in the classroom. King completed his dissertation in April 1955 and received his PhD that June. He was not able to attend his graduation ceremony due to financial constraints and his wife Coretta Scott  King ’s pregnancy. 

W. T. Handy to King, 18 November 1952, in  Papers  2:160–164 .

Introduction, in  Papers  2:1–25 .

King, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” 15 April 1955, in  Papers  2:339–544 .

King, Fragment of Application to Boston University, September 1950–December 1950, in  Papers  1:390 .