After completing his course work, graduate students usually write a dissertation or
thesis, supposedly an independent and original contribution to scholarship. King's
thesis was anything but original. In fact, the sheer extent of his plagiarism is
breathtaking.
Page after page contains nothing but direct, verbatim transcriptions of the work of
others. In 1990, the King Project estimated that less than half of some chapters was
actually written by King himself. Since then, even more of his "borrowings" have been
traced.
Calculating the exact extent of his plagiarism will require a computer analysis, but
having looked over Chapter III in detail, I estimate that at least three quarters of it
was stolen from other authors.
King stole from the subjects of his dissertation, the theologians Tillich and Wieman. He
copied the writings of other theologians - passages from philosophy textbooks. But most
unforgivably of all, thousands of words in paragraph-sized chunks, were taken from the
thesis of a fellow student, Jack Boozer, an ex-army chaplain who returned to Boston
University after the war to get his degree.
We even know how he did it, for King was systematic in his plagiarism. He copied
significant phrases, sentences or whole paragraphs from the books he was consulting onto
a set of index cards. "Writing" a thesis was then a matter of arranging these cards into
a meaningful order.
Sometimes he linked the stolen parts together with an occasional phrase of his own, but
as often as not he left the words completely unchanged. The index cards still survive,
with their damning evidence intact.
King fooled everybody: his adviser, his thesis reader and King scholars for more than 30
years. Nor did he stop after graduation; as early as the 1970s, King scholar Ira Zepp
noticed that sections of King's first published book Striding Towards Freedom were taken
verbatim from Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros and Paul Ramsay's Basic Christian Ethics
(sheesh!).
Zepp, as so many have done since then, remained silent.
Like most graduate students, King spent the first half of his doctoral work taking
courses in his degree area, theology. His surviving papers from that period show that
from the very beginning he was transcribing articles by eminent theologians, often word
for word, and representing them as his own work.
If universities are to have a holiday honoring someone who helped African-Americans, a
better candidate would be Lincoln's birthday (which is more important, freedom from
slavery or where you can sit on a bus?). If they are to have a holiday honoring someone
with a black skin (or, more accurately, an African-American--- otherwise we have to get
into complex complexion issues), then Thurgood Marshall, who was heavily involved in
school desegregation would be a better choice (he was a lousy judge, but a very good
lawyer). Or how about an important anniversary, such as that of the Emancipation
Proclamation, or the 15th Amendment, or Brown v. Board of Education?
In the time line linked above, I came across an interesting item I hadn't heard of before:
A warrant is issued for Dr. King�s arrest on charges that he had falsified his 1956 and
1958 Alabama state income tax returns.
...
May 28
Dr. King is acquitted of the tax evasion charge by an all white jury in Montgomery,
Alabama.
February 17
What is interesting is not that he was charged with tax evasion, but that he was
acquitted by an all-white jury. It is also something to keep in mind, though, that
regulatory laws can be abused. There are very few tax fraud prosecutions, but
practically everybody has violated the tax laws unintentionally in some minor way (say,
by underreporting the sales tax they owe on out-of-state purchases).
[ http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/04.01.19b.htm . erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]
To return to Eric Rasmusen's weblog, click http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/0.rasmusen.htm.