Martin Luther King, Jr. was guilty of plagiarism, not just as a one time failing, but continuously, habitually, flagrantly. The evidence renders this not debatable. What is debatable, however, is the significance of this, how it should affect our assessment of King and his life’s work.
King’s Plagiarism
King was admitted to Morehouse College, a small all-male all-Black college in Atlanta, at the age of 15. At first glance this would seem to indicate he was an unusually promising student, but while there may have been an element of that, it was also a function of his being pushed hard by ambitious parents and by the fact that Morehouse eased its requirements for an early admission program due to so many of its students leaving to serve in the military during World War II.
At Morehouse King was a middling student. Some of his professors noted some carelessness in his writing, but he did well enough to get by. A later examination of his written work at Morehouse showed only milder, more borderline cases of plagiarism than the blatant examples that were to show up later in his academic career.
After Morehouse, King attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, from which he received a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951, and Boston University, from which he received a Ph.D. in Theology in 1955.
It was at these latter two institutions that King’s plagiarism became more serious. In his research for a paper, King would write down on note cards verbatim passages he considered most important. Then when it came time to write the paper, he would arrange these cards in a tentative order and type up his paper from them.
For some of his papers, he used his notes exactly as you would want a student to do. He paraphrased the ideas into his own words, and combined them with plenty of ideas of his own that did not come from his note cards. There were not a lot of quotations, and what there were were properly identified as such and cited.
For other papers, he changed the wording from his note cards very little if at all, added a lot less material of his own, did not identify most of his quotations as quotations, and did not acknowledge their source. In the most extreme cases, as much as 75 percent of a King paper are unattributed quotations, falsely presented as if they are his own words.
King’s Ph.D. dissertation itself was substantially plagiarized in this fashion. His book Stride Toward Freedom, published in 1958, which was heavily edited and ghostwritten in the first place, has some instances of material worded closely to that of other books without attribution, though it’s not as clear cut and flagrant an instance of plagiarism as the worst cases from his academic career.
A close examination of King’s sermons and speeches shows they were often reworkings of previous written works and orations. For example, the famous “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963 repeats many phrases that he himself had been using for years in his speeches, as well as passages that echo fairly closely elements of Archibald Carey, Jr.’s address to the 1952 Republican National Convention.
Why Did King Plagiarize?
Why does any student plagiarize? They plagiarize because there’s something they want-a certain grade, a certain degree, the approval of their parents, to remain on track for a certain career, etc.-that they are unable or unwilling to obtain without bending or breaking the rules, and there’s nothing in them morally that blocks them from bending or breaking the rules.
For King specifically it appears he was in over his head at Crozer and at Boston University. King didn’t have a top flight academic mind. That doesn’t mean he was stupid; it just means he wasn’t one of the tiny fraction of people who are suited intellectually and otherwise to graduate level work at a serious institution. With no cheating at all he probably could have made it through many if not most undergraduate programs, but not excelled, and he certainly had no business doing Ph.D. level work.
College and especially graduate level writing is supposed to show two main things-a mastery of existing material and an ability to paraphrase it in your own words, plus an ability to add to that existing material with original thought that can in effect take the scholarly dialogue forward. King had some ability at both, but not consistently enough for all his assignments. So infrequently at lower levels and with increasing frequency at higher levels, he fell back on using the words of other people.
King had no intention of pursuing an academic career after all. He was to be a clergyman, he wanted to fight for the rights of his people, and he wanted to be able to present himself and articulate his ideas in a way that would garner him some degree of respect and influence in the white world. He was not destined to spend his life in libraries poring over footnotes in obscure academic journals.
When a topic genuinely interested him, he pursued it with considerable zeal. For example, after a public talk about Gandhi inspired him, he bought several books and eagerly read them to better understand the Indian leader’s spiritual, moral, and political ideas and how they might fit with his own. This is not something a lazy or stupid student who just wants to cheat his way through school does. But when something did not engage him, or he was not confident of his intellectual grasp of it, he took short cuts.
For the most part, his sojourn in academia was a temporary one, a means to an end, and he did what he had to do to make it through successfully. Like many students-unfortunately probably the majority-he was not a stickler for the rules when abiding by them would have been too inconvenient.
The fact that he got away with mild versions of plagiarism early on helps to explain why he continued doing it, and indeed took greater chances by plagiarizing more blatantly later.
He got away with the more blatant plagiarism as well, as none of it even came to light until well after he was dead. Commentators have seized on this to make two speculative points.
Some say that the way he plagiarized without even trying to be subtle or tricky about it, and the fact that he never got any negative feedback for doing so, indicate that he didn’t regard what he was doing as plagiarism or as anything wrong. Others say that they indicate that his professors were white liberals who patronizingly didn’t bother to scrutinize his work closely or hold him up to the usual standards because they wanted the African American man to succeed. There may be some truth to both claims, but likely neither is more than a half truth.
As to the first point, certainly some students really don’t understand the concept of plagiarism, and think that if they’re asked for certain information or a certain kind of paper, and if they then do the work to find this material in a reputable source and to copy it out, thus providing the professor with what they were asked for, then they’ve done just what they were supposed to do. They either aren’t aware they’re supposed to cite their sources a certain way, or they think of it as a fairly trivial stylistic preference of some professors-like numbering the pages a certain way or using single or double spacing-and not that big a deal to skip if it’s too much bother.
But that’s more typical of (some) freshmen. Perhaps some institutions were different in some historical periods, but one would hope that any student who gets deeper into college and certainly anyone in graduate school would grasp that plagiarizing to the extent King did on some of his papers is flat out cheating. That King didn’t know that what he was doing constituted plagiarizing, or didn’t know it was wrong to plagiarize, is not plausible, though it’s certainly possible he saw it as a quite minor transgression, just a very common way that students cut corners, and that he was encouraged to think of it this way by the lack of response from his professors.
As to the second point, professors are human too and it’s not far-fetched that one of the biases they might have in a case like this would be to go a little easy on a student like King-a highly likable, articulate, warm fellow who shared their belief in liberal theology, and a member of an oppressed race who had had far more to overcome to get this far than the vast majority of his classmates.
Some have noted in opposition to this point that among the few other African Americans who attended these institutions during this historical period, there were some who got low grades, some who failed and left, some who were disciplined for academic violations, etc., so there must not have been this kind of liberal racial bias. But all that establishes is that there wasn’t the sort of absolute bias that guarantees that one hundred percent of African American students will succeed regardless of what they do. It doesn’t establish that there was not some lesser degree of bias, that some people-consciously or unconsciously-could have been motivated by a sort of informal “affirmative action” in their assessments of King’s work.
Does it Matter That King Plagiarized?
Unfortunately this is one of those subjects that is hard to address unemotionally. Many liberals, African Americans, and others emotionally invested in King being a heroic figure want to deny he was guilty of plagiarism, or to minimize its importance. On the other hand, many conservatives, racists, and others emotionally invested in detesting King and all he stood for look on the plagiarism revelations with glee and treat them as evidence that he was a fraud.
As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in academia and who takes its standards quite seriously, I am inclined to react pretty strongly to plagiarism. At the same time, I also recognize that in terms of the sins people commit-including people regarded as American heroes, people who have holidays named after them, people held out as role models, etc.-this one is pretty minor.
In the narrow confines of academia itself, if anything there has been an underreaction to King’s plagiarism. Boston University considered revoking his Ph.D., but ultimately decided on a compromise where the degree would stand, but a note would be attached to the dissertation explaining that parts of it were lifted from other sources without proper attribution. You can make a pretty good case that the plagiarism is serious enough academic wrongdoing to warrant the more severe academic punishment of revoking the doctorate.
But in the broader context of society, of history, should King’s plagiarism cause us to condemn him as a human being, to take back our admiration, to rethink the wisdom of instituting a holiday in his name, etc.? No, or at least not to any but a very, very small degree.
His behavior manifested a flaw. An extremely common flaw. It’s not remotely close to as significant as what many other American “greats” have done, including owning human beings, engaging in genocidal wars against indigenous peoples, or even the routine dishonesty and cheating that prominent people do to make it to the top financially and politically in an imperfect world where “nice guys finish last.
It shows King wasn’t perfect. It’s not something to be more than mildly disappointed about unless your inclination toward hero worship requires an unrealistic purity in those you put on a pedestal. Heaven knows that when you put the plagiarism, and his other flaws for that matter, in the scales along with all the good he did, the way he so often conducted himself with courage, intelligence, love and integrity in situations that would have overwhelmed most people, things come out pretty strongly in his favor.
As far as the non-academic “plagiarism,” that strikes me as even more dubious a point of criticism. Of course speeches and sermons make use of various ideas that others have expressed at various times and places. That King used an example from this person’s sermon, or some phrasing from that person’s speech is pretty insignificant. Perhaps there are occasions he could have altered the material a bit more to make it his own, or explicitly mentioned that he was inspired by so-and-so to make a certain point, but for the most part King’s sermons and speeches were indeed his own. Even if some of the words were not, the combination of the words and the way he delivered them were.
Finally, most importantly, however the plagiarism issue affects one’s opinion of King as an individual and his moral character, there is no justification for then extending that to his ideas and the movement he led. Overquoting without proper citation is a fairly minor but not completely insignificant wrongdoing, but even if King were guilty of something ten times worse, surely that would not somehow invalidate the Civil Rights Movement.
Do King’s flaws make it OK that legal and illegal means up to and including torture and murder were used for decades to ensure that for all intents and purposes no African Americans voted in the South? Do they make it appropriate that people with a certain color skin shouldn’t be allowed to use public restrooms, or ride anywhere but in the backs of buses? Do they justify failing to enforce the Constitution when it would be inconvenient to the white power structure? Do they invalidate the choice to use peaceful civil disobedience in pursuit of civil rights, as opposed to using violence or simply acquiescing in injustice? Do they justify a society where such factors as race and economic deprivation doom millions of children to an almost certainly miserable life in a land of abundance?
Such questions answer themselves.
Sources:
Clayborn Carson, “Editing Martin Luther King, Jr.: Political and Scholarly Issues.” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
Ralph E. Luker, “On Martin Luther King’s Plagiarism…” History News Network.
“Boston U. Panel Finds Plagiarism by Dr. King.” The New York Times.
“Four Things About King.” Snopes.
