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“nature,” making any side-by-side comparison of the two passages
a waste of space. More than half of King’s dissertation – like
the aforementioned example – reads like a near copy of Boozer’s
work.

The “conjoining of different sections of Boozer’s dissertation
could not have been done without great circumspection and
forethought,” notes Pappas, so “it gives lie to the notion that
King somehow plagiarized unintentionally.” Pappas further
discounts claims that King was unaware he had engaged in any
wrongdoing by observing that he had spent seven years in post-
secondary education, had taken a thesis-writing course, and had
been warned by an advisor that his paper nearly quoted another
work without attribution.

Many readers might wonder why King, an intelligent and capable
man, would cheat his way to a Ph.D. Of more relevance is the
question of why faculty let him do it. King’s doctoral advisor
also played the same role with Jack Boozer. He approved Boozer’s
paper in 1952 and just three years later stamped his imprimatur
on King’s purloined dissertation.

Nearly four decades later, when confronted with the same chance
to redeem itself in the wake of the plagiarism charges, BU chose
to cover-up once again. Then acting BU President John Westling
labeled the story “false,” claiming that the paper had “been
scrupulously examined and reexamined by scholars,” resulting in
the discovery of “Not a single instance of plagiarism.”

Clayborne Carson, editor of the federally-funded King Papers
Project at Stanford University, chose obfuscation over truth as
well. Carson sat on the information and denied early reports of
the preacher’s intellectual theft despite knowing about it three
years before the story broke. In early 1990, Carson told his
underwriter, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Like
him, the NEH didn’t think it necessary to disclose this
inconvenient information to the American public.

When it became obvious that King did, in fact, regularly
plagiarize, his academic cheerleaders chose to redefine
plagiarism rather then reassess the Baptist preacher. For
Arizona State University Professor Keith Miller, King’s
unattributed use of other scholars’ work is “synthesizing,”
“alchemizing,” “incorporations, “intertexulaizations,”
everything but the “p” word. “How could such a compelling leader
commit what most people define as a writer’s worst sin”? asked
Miller. “The contradiction should prompt us to rethink our
definition of plagiarism.”

While shameless intellectuals peddle baseless allegations about
the marital fidelity of Dwight Eisenhower or spin tales of
Thomas Jefferson begetting slave offspring, they consider it
blasphemy to honestly assess the plagiarism of Martin Luther
King. There are literally hundreds of books about King, yet one
would be hard pressed to find even a handful that address the
plagiarism question. With so much redundancy within this cottage
industry of publishing, one would think that authors would jump
at the chance to examine an unexplored facet of their subject’s
life – not so!

It would be wrong to think “plagiarist” every time one reflects
on the life of Martin Luther King. The Baptist minister led a
movement which secured voting rights for millions of Americans
deprived of suffrage and drastically reduced the amount of
racial discrimination present in the United States. Questions of
plagiary, adultery, and demagoguery (e.g., he labeled the
philosophy of Barry Goldwater, “Hitlerism”), are secondary.

Plagiarism and the Culture War is written with a sobriety that
is essential to effectively discussing such sensitive topics as
race and the shortcomings of a martyred hero. While
hagiographers may shout “racism” at any hint of imperfection
attributed to the slain civil rights leader, Pappas’ courageous
work assures that they can no longer continue this smokescreen
with any legitimacy.

“Our immense debt to the man and our respect for his memory do
not,” Pappas writes, “provide the slightest excuse for a
political agenda that credits him with virtues that he did not
have and successes that he did not achieve.”

Plagiarism and the Culture War uncovers what rational observers
have known about Martin Luther King for decades: that the man
canonized by the academic left was, merely a man. What it tells
us about intellectuals more concerned with “diversity” than
truth is far more revealing.

http://westernrevival.org/?p=59


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