Evidence of borrowing first surfaced in 1987, when a graduate student working with Carson found passages in King’s 343 page dissertation that had been lifted from other works without proper citation. The thesis, a comparative study of theologians Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, used virtually the same words and ideas as a dissertation written several years earlier by another BU student, Jack Boozer. King gives general credit to Boozer in a footnote, but, Carson concludes, it does not reflect his heavy reliance on Boozer’s work. An investigation into King’s other academic writings–both at BU and Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa.–revealed the same disturbing pattern.
Historians are at a loss to explain King’s dubious scholarship. It almost certainly was not out of a need to cover up academic shortcomings. King had been in colleges, universities and seminaries for 11 years by the time he submitted his dissertation; he earned strong grades at Crozer and BU, and even took a course in thesis writing. One dispiriting possibility: his teachers held him to a lower standard of performance because he was black. Carson and those who worked with King suggest he had taken the oral traditions of the black church with him to academia. In “voice merging,” preachers synthesize the words and ideas of those who spoke before them. As Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference told The New York Times: “Preachers have an old saying. The first time they use somebody else’s work they give credit. The second time, they say some thinker said it. The third time they just say it.”
The real question is whether Carson’s findings diminish King’s legacy–the majestically articulated vision of racial justice for which he won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. The historic value of the early papers in question is virtually nil. They carry no hint of the galvanizing message he would one day deliver extemporaneously from the pulpit. Scholars have known for years that King’s later books and magazine articles were written by others. But such is the case with numerous public figures. “It’s the element of submitting it for academic credit that makes the difference,” King biographer David Garrow told NEWSWEEK. “It will diminish his reputation.”
The Journal’s disclosure ended several year of anguished silence for Carson and his colleagues. They will proceed with their original plan–to publish the plagiarism findings in 1992 as extensive footnotes in the first two volumes of a 14-volume series on the King papers. It’s a task Carson will perform with sadness. “Unlike other discoveries that you can be happy and elated with, there is little joy in this,” says Carson. Nor is it likely to end the furor. The Journal also reported last week that Arizona State University professor Keith Miller will publish a book next spring showing that King borrowed heavily from others in later works. It will add to a body of disturbing revelations about King, including details of his womanizing disclosed by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy last year. Clearly enough to tarnish a reputation, but not a life–one that King lost defending transcendent ideals.
Uncompromising on civil rights, King was a less rigorous scholar, drawing freely on the work of others without attribution. An example:
We must grant freely, however, that final intellectual certainty about God is impossible. Our knowledge of the absolute will always remain relitive [sic]. We can never gain complete knowledge or proof of the real.
MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr. The Place of Reason and Experience in Finding God
EDGAR S. BRIGHTMAN The Finding of God
