The startling disclosure that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarized substantial portions of his doctoral dissertation and other student papers has raised troubling questions for the researchers who discovered the plagiarism, for the scholars serving as advisers to the project of editing King’s papers, and for a society that has generally revered King’s legacy.
Chief among those questions, say sources involved in the case, are:
Did scholars proceed appropriately, and quickly enough, when they uncovered damaging information about a public figure they admire?
Is their primary duty to their discipline or to a broader public?
How will the disclosure affect both scholarship on the civil-rights movement and King’s image, already tarnished to some degree by recent publicity about extramarital affairs?
The questions were sparked primarily by a report first published in The Wall Street Journal. It said scholars had discovered that King had apparently included, without sufficient attribution, many passages from other authors in his dissertation, which was completed at Boston University in 1955.
At a news conference the next day at Stanford University, Clayborne Carson, a historian who is director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project, confirmed that he and others had discovered a consistent pattern of “unacknowledged appropriation of words or ideas” in King’s student papers.
Under Mr. Carson’s direction, the project since 1984 has been preparing a multi-volume edition of all of King’s papers. The first volume, which will include King’s writings from his years as a student at Boston University and elsewhere, was to have been published early next year. It has been delayed for an additional year, however, to document fully the instances of plagiarism in King’s student papers and to prepare an article on them for a scholarly journal, Mr. Carson said.
Mr. Carson held the press briefing to elaborate on the project’s finding. He told The Chronicle that a member of the project had inadvertently leaked news of the finding to The Wall Street Journal while Mr. Carson was making final revisions on a scholarly article about the plagiarism. Mr. Carson said his article had been accepted by The Journal of American History and is slated to appear in its June 1991 issue.
In a lengthy statement released to the press this month, the editors of the King papers acknowledged that in 1988, in the course of work being carried out to annotate the texts King used in developing his thesis, “staff members became aware that many of King’s academic papers contained passages that were similar or identical to texts King consulted, and that these source texts were not adequately cited.”
King acknowledged his sources in a general way in the introduction to the dissertation, the project’s editors said, but he did not footnote or otherwise clearly indicate specific passages taken from other materials.
The project’s editors said their work was meant to document the historical and intellectual roots of King’s ideas, and not to pass judgment on whether his citation practices conformed to scholarly convention.
Nonetheless, because of the controversial nature of their finding, Mr. Carson met with about a dozen members of the project’s advisory board, including a number of scholars, in October 1989 to decide how to make their discovery public.
According to scholars familiar with it, the discussion focused on two general options:
Whether to release the information separately from the first volume of edited papers.
Whether to include in the relevant volume a detailed but visually distracting citation-by-citation annotation, or a composite summary of the appropriated passages.
“We were worried that many in the press would distort the evidence and sensationalize it,” said Louis R. Harlan, a board member and professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park, who edited the papers of Booker T. Washington.
The feeling, Mr. Harlan recalled, was that “it’s important to be a good historian here.”
“We wanted to say it right and truthfully and fully at the time we break the story, and scholarship breaks slowly.”
Mr. Carson said he was concerned that if the project’s editors did not write about the plagiarism before publishing it in the volumes, the issue “would be the only thing discussed about the scholarly volumes.” He added that he was not surprised at the wide publicity given to the plagiarism issue, but he was concerned that the “vast majority of our work will be overlooked.”
Many of Mr. Carson’s colleagues said he had handled the situation with integrity.
But some critics decry the nearly three-year delay in making public the extent of King’s plagiarism.
Scholars and others say they had been hearing about the evidence of plagiarism through the academic grapevine at least since 1989. Last spring Thomas Fleming, the editor of Chronicles, a conservative journal of opinion, made reference to it in speeches he gave at two scholarly meetings. In addition, his journal planned to run an opinion piece by John Shelton Reed in its June 1990 issue. In the piece, Mr. Reed, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, urged Boston University to revoke King’s doctoral degree and instead award an honorary one.
Mr. Reed, who is now on leave at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, Cal., said of his suggestion: “He’d still be `Dr. King,’ but his award would be for work he did do, not for work he didn’t. He went out and changed the world, and not many BU grads can say that.”
Mr. Reed said he wrote his column, which he described as a “thumb sucker” about scholars’ strong distaste for plagiarism and the impact of the charges on King’s legacy, on the assumption that by the time it ran, the plagiarism story would already have broken in the general press.
As the late-May publication date neared, it became apparent to Mr. Reed that that wasn’t going to happen, and, he said, “I didn’t want the story to be `Reed alleges King plagiarism.’ ”
Mr. Reed also said that, after sending a copy of his planned column to Boston University as a courtesy, he had received a strongly worded letter from the university’s interim president, Jon Westling, insisting that there was no substantiated evidence of plagiarism. Mr. Reed also said that he did not want it to appear that he had taken advantage of his advisory role at the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has already granted nearly $500,000 to the King papers project. Mr. Reed withdrew his column.
Theodore Pappas, a Chronicles editor, said that when he discussed the issue with one of the editors at the King-papers project over the summer, he was told that they would need nine months to document the instances of plagiarism. Mr. Pappas secured copies of King’s dissertation and that of the late Jack S. Boozer, who had completed his thesis in 1952 under the same adviser, the late L. Harold deWolf, who supervised King’s dissertation three years later. The Boozer and King theses dealt with similar topics, and King cited the former’s thesis in his introduction.
In an article to appear in the December issue of Chronicles, which was sent to press two weeks before the The Wall Street Journal story appeared, Mr. Pappas reprints six lengthy passages from King’s dissertation that matched passages in Mr. Boozer’s thesis nearly word for word.
In response to the information released by Mr. Carson, Boston University has announced that four theology scholars will investigate the plagiarism charges. In a statement, Mr. Westling, the acting president, said that “35 years ago, as now, the university’s standards for the proper use and attribution of scholarly sources were strict and explicitly made known to all graduate students.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Pappas thinks that the scholarly community has dragged its feet on disseminating the plagiarism evidence because it runs counter to the “official position” on King.
Whether that charge is valid -- Stanford’s Mr. Carson and officials at Boston University do not think it is -- scholars and veterans of the civil-rights movement agree that the evidence of plagiarism will probably tarnish King’s reputation in some quarters.
Maryland’s Mr. Harlan pointed out, however, that “most major historical figures go through cycles of reputation.”
Echoing the view of the project editors and Boston University officials, Mr. Harlan stressed that King’s status in history was based on his dedication to fighting for civil rights. “So he was less than a great scholar,” Mr. Harlan said. “So what? He served a noble cause.”
Mr. Carson noted that “anyone doing research has to go on faith that it is better to know more than less.”
“All of us knew we would come up with positive and negative information,” he said.
Despite the discomfort caused by finding evidence of plagiarism, Mr. Carson said, the discovery “increases our understanding of how a flawed individual does remarkable things, which is a more interesting story than how a perfect individual does them.”
Another member of the King-papers advisory board, Ira Berlin, a professor of history at the University of Maryland and director of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, said he believed the revelations of plagiarism might have a salutary effect in the long run.
Acknowledging that he is not himself a King scholar, Mr. Berlin argued that the finding was “a real intellectual problem for King scholars, and they’re going to have to deal with it.”
“They will have to think more about how he learned and what influenced his thinking,” Mr. Berlin said.
Seeing how heavily King drew on the thinking of other theologians and philosophers, Mr. Berlin added, “kind of renews an emphasis on the civil-rights movement as a whole, not just on individual icons.”
The question should become, he said, “not why we don’t have another Martin Luther King, but why we don’t have another movement which would produce another Martin Luther King.”