There is little doubt that the most controversial book I’ve written is I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. Many black readers were outraged that I spoke openly about Dr. King’s shortcomings in the book, especially allegations that he was a plagiarist and an adulterer. Ironically, many of my critics never read the book. Only when I appeared in the media and explained my love and admiration for King did the attacks subside. I argued that we must confront King’s failures honestly since they are part of the historical record, but that his flaws cannot diminish his legendary status. I was also keen on being frank about King’s failures so that the younger generation might believe that they didn’t have to be perfect to be useful. In fact, the failure to address King’s all-too-human behavior only strengthens the hand of his enemies, since they will be free to distort King’s memory with their own jaundiced and bigoted views of his life. Better to tell the truth and still claim King’s greatness, than pretend that King wasn’t a human being who had shortcomings like the rest of us. This chapter addresses the rich oral traditions from which King drew in developing his style of speaking, while confronting King’s plagiarism in academic circles. I make a distinction between King’s oral borrowing—part of a well-established tradition of verbal sharing that, while not exclusive to black culture, does have unique resonance—and his literary lapses on the page. I also attempt to explain the psychological elements that may have driven his actions, while offering an account of the racial pressures that may help explain his behavior. Perhaps the greatest vindication of my efforts was supplied by Andrew Young, who told me that my book was honest and necessary, and that I had gotten King and his courageous cohort right. Coming from one of King’s most trusted lieutenants, Young’s words have been a blessed source of peace.
AT A RECENT CONFERENCE ON BLACK MALES, I shared keynote responsibilities with two other speakers. One of them was a forty–something civil rights leader and Baptist preacher. It was February, known in my circles as “National Rent-a-Negro Month”1 in homage to the flurry of Black History Month activities that colleges and corporations cram into those twenty-eight days (as if no other time was appropriate to recognize black achievement). I hustled into the conference late, arriving just in time to hear the closing comments of the civil rights leader, who by now was “putting on the rousements”—firing the crowd up with his astute analysis of the crises confronting black men. He was sailing fast now, punctuating his speech with powerful phrases he knew would elicit the audience’s approval, an old trick that we Baptist preachers use to send our congregations out to do the Lord’s work.
Just as the speaker reached the climax of his oration, I was whisked to the back entry of the stage to await my turn to speak, since all three keynoters were presenting in rapid succession. As I watched my colleague finish, I got an even better sense of the glorious rapport he had established with his audience, a sublime connection that gives both parties a rush that few other events can match. As he offered his husky-voiced parting thoughts, the crowd leaped to its feet, and so did I, gleefully grabbing him as he came off stage in a brotherly bear hug, wrapping him in the audience’s affection as their unofficial emissary.
“Hey, Doc, how ya doin?” my colleague brightly greeted me.
“Man, you tore it up,” I enthused. “I got a hard act to follow, boy.”
“Aw, man,” he graciously responded, “you know you gonna turn it out.”
“I don’t know, brother,” I shot back. “You look like you killed everythang in there. And what ain’t dead, you done put in intensive care.”
We both cracked up, bathing each other in the occasionally obnoxious mutual admiration to which Baptist preachers are eagerly given. As I was being introduced, my colleague offered his regrets about having to leave for another engagement. I readily understood, since I would have to leave right after my speech for the next town in my Black History Month tour.
As the crowd warmly greeted me, I let on that my colleague was difficult to follow but that I’d try to do my best (a Baptist preacher way of begging for sympathy and winning the crowd). My grasp at pity seemed to be working, as the crowd urged me on with “amens” and “go ’heads.” I slid easily enough into my speech, but at a crucial period—or, more exactly, at a crucial three-minute passage that I had used in many of my speeches over the past year—I felt the enthusiasm of the audience flag. Usually my passage drew uproarious guffaws and penetrating “humhs,” but now I was greeted with sprinkled laughter and moderate “huhs,” the kind that feel more obligatory than genuine. I pressed on, not giving it much thought, chalking the lukewarm response up to my poor delivery or to having misjudged my audience. But the rest of my speech went well. I too got a standing ovation and was grateful for the audience’s loving endorsement. But after my speech, I wondered again why my passage hadn’t gone over as hugely as it usually did. Not until later did I discover what had gone wrong.
Three weeks after my keynote speech, I had a speaking engagement in a nearby town. The woman who picked me up from the airport for the hour-long drive to the university remarked that she had attended the conference on black males and had enjoyed all of our speeches.
“I know you must have wondered why, when you got to a certain point in your speech, people didn’t respond as enthusiastically as you perhaps thought they would,” my host offered, impressing me with her savvy while piquing my interest.
“Yeah, I did wonder what had happened,” I confessed.
“Well, the speaker before you had gone through the same routine in his speech,” she revealed. “And since the audience had just heard it, their response was certainly muted.”
“O-h-h-h-h,” I said. “Now I get it.”
Although I was friendly with the civil rights leader, I took it as a matter of pride to point out to my host that he had ripped me off, and not vice versa. As soon as my host’s comments hit my ears, I recalled that the civil rights leader’s wife had heard me preach a few months before at a black Baptist church, and since her husband couldn’t attend, she promised that she would give him a tape of my sermon. I had used my dramatic passage in that sermon, and of course, he had obviously listened to the tape and lifted my passage for his speeches. In spite of my brief fit of ego, I couldn’t stay sore at my colleague. After all, Baptist preachers are always ripping each other off and using the stories, illustrations, phrases, verbal tics, mannerisms—and in some cases, whole sermons—we glean from other preachers. That’s how we learn to preach; by preaching like somebody else until we learn how to preach like ourselves, when our own voice emerges from the colloquy of voices we convene in our homiletical imagination. And in the end, the only justification for such edifying thievery among preachers is that the Word is being preached and the ultimate Author of what we say is being glorified.
In fact, the line I had used about the civil rights leader having “killed everythang in there” was torn straight from the transcript2 of a thousand other conversations between black Baptist preachers congratulating one another for their rhetorical might. Then, too, I knew the humorous three-step rhetorical rule of citation by which many black Baptist preachers operate. The first time they repeat something they hear, they say, “like Martin Luther King said . . .” The second time they repeat it, they say, “like somebody said . . .” The third time they repeat it, they say, “like I always say . . .” None of this means that there aren’t rules of fair play—that one shouldn’t work exceedingly hard in preaching with a Bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other (an idea ripped off from theologian Karl Barth),3 that one shouldn’t hunt for inspiration in all sorts of unusual places, and that one shouldn’t feed one’s flock with the fruits of rigorous intellectual and spiritual engagement. At their best, the practices of black Baptist preachers4 remind us that knowledge is indeed communal, that rhetoric is shaped in the interplay of a rich variety of language users, and that what is old becomes new again by being recast in forceful and imaginative ways.
All of this is crucial if we are to make sense of the recent revelation that Martin Luther King, Jr., borrowed other people’s words in his published and preached sermons.5 Of course, nothing I have said can account for the even more disturbing charge that King was a plagiarist in his academic work. It is now clear that he plagiarized huge chunks of his dissertation and graduate school papers and that he carelessly cited sources in his seminary and undergraduate papers. This news is especially jarring to those who view King as an American original, a figure whose social vision came wrapped in brilliant metaphors and memorable phrases. The notion that a figure who commanded the English language with such authority was in truth a borrower of other people’s words is too hard for King’s admirers to swallow. For many Americans, King’s example is law, his words scripture. In fact, King’s memory has become a racial Esperanto. His life has been made into a moral language that allows whites to translate their hopes and fears about black life into meanings that black folk intuitively understand. Much of King’s power hinged on his use of language, indeed, his use as language. His moral authority was largely rooted in his unique ability to express eloquently the claims of black freedom.
In that light, understanding what King did with language—that is, getting at his complex rhetorical habits and the presuppositions he brought to his spoken and written work—will give us a better sense of how to judge his achievements and failures. By explaining how King absorbed and recycled rhetorical sources and how he creatively fused a variety of voices in finding his own voice, one may be charged with excusing his verbal theft by “converting King’s blemish into a grand achievement.”6 Worse yet, one may be charged with appealing to some mythic racial practice to justify his borrowing, but certainly not borrowed, genius. But that is to confuse explanation with justification. Such a conclusion clings desperately to the naive belief that we must ignore context and circumstance in making moral judgments.
King’s borrowing, and at times, outright theft, of others’ words must be viewed in two arenas: his sermons in the pulpit and in print, and his scholarly writing in the academy before that. The most sophisticated arguments to date about King’s use of language in the pulpit and in print have been made by scholars Keith D. Miller and Richard Lischer. Miller, in his insightful Voice of Deliverance, persuasively argues that King heavily borrowed from white liberal preachers in his published sermons to further the cause of civil rights.7 He ingeniously seized on the ethical and political dimensions of white liberal sermons—including their emphasis on the Christian social gospel, their antimilitarism, their critiques of capitalism and communism, and even their inchoate antiracism—to cast his own arguments for black emancipation in terms that white liberal listeners would find irresistible.8 By fusing his voice with white liberal voices, King practiced, in Miller’s term, the black oral art of “voice-merging,” an ancient practice in black religious circles.9 Miller argues that in such circles, speech is seen not as private but as communal property. In black oral culture black folk learn to refine rhetoric and shape identity by joining their voices to the voices of their ancestors and their contemporary inspirations. Thus, King didn’t view such an art as verbal theft but as a time-honored, community-blessed tradition with deep roots in black culture.
Richard Lischer agrees in substance with this aspect of Miller’s argument. His brilliantly argued The Preacher King explores the rich rhetorical resources that King inherited as a prince of the black church.10 While Miller analyzes King’s written sermons and speeches, Lischer pays close attention to King’s spoken word, poring over the unedited audiotapes and transcripts of King’s sermons and speeches. Lischer argues that King’s real voice was edited out of his published sermons11 as he and his publisher sought to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Where Miller finds virtue in such a strategy, Lischer smells trouble. Not only is King’s spoken voice missing—a voice full of cultural allusion, racial wisdom, and black rhythms that were muted under the dogma of pen and page—but his theological and ideological evolution—a full-blown radicalism that was especially apparent in his highly personal, magnificently improvised, and deeply colloquial black sermonizing—is completely whitewashed. Lischer disagrees with the notion that “in his plagiarism King was simply adhering to the standards of African-American . . . preaching.”12 He claims that it “is one thing to assert” that language is a shared commodity in black culture,13 which he concedes, but “it is quite another to translate that generalization into a rationale for academic falsification.” Finally, Lischer thinks that Miller overstates the extent to which King borrowed.14 After all, he argues, white liberal ministers borrowed freely from each other (Miller also makes this point).
Despite their disagreements, Miller and Lischer offer persuasive arguments about how King used his intellectual and rhetorical gifts to bring about social change. Both authors help us understand exactly how King went about the formidable task of drawing on black cultural and religious traditions while shaping a message of liberation that could sway the conscience of white America. By digging deep into the history of black oral traditions, they help us understand a much celebrated but little understood practice: black preaching. Their brilliant explorations of the mechanics, methods, and modes of black sacred rhetoric help us see that black preachers often give their listeners reason to hope and fuel to survive by spinning words into the Word. Black preachers coin phrases, stack sentences, accumulate wise sayings, and borrow speech to convince black folk, as the gospel song says, to “run on to see what the end is gonna be.” King had a genius for knowing what intellectual and spiritual resources to bring together, and to know when such a fusion would make the most sense and the greatest impact on his hearers.
As Miller and Lischer make clear, King’s borrowing had a noble purpose. For Miller, it was nothing less than the reflection back to liberal white America of the ideals it cherished in comforting and familiar language.15 For Lischer, King’s borrowing helped to subvert the status quo as King’s speech progressively filled with rage in denouncing racial optimism.16 Miller is right to emphasize King’s brilliant reworking of white liberal religious themes and to suggest that King’s success, at least the success of his early years, was surely linked to the perception by liberal whites that he and, by extension, most other blacks, was very much like them. King possessed the unique ability to convince liberal whites, through phrases and sermon plots they were familiar with, that black freedom was a legitimate goal because it was linked to social ideals they embraced each Sunday morning. By embracing liberal orthodoxy through the rhetoric of its main exponents, King was able to send the message that he and the blacks he represented were committed to the same goal of social reform as white Protestants. Miller also convincingly argues that through the rhetoric at hand, King constructed a public persona—a social self—that expressed blackness in a fashion that appealed to the white mainstream.17
Lischer complains that Miller’s notion of self-making makes King appear duplicitous.18 But Miller discerns in King’s public persona the tough but inevitable choice that all minorities in a dominant culture face: how to put one’s best face forward. Given that King was concerned or, early on, even obsessed with what would work in white America, he was perhaps compelled to mold a public persona that pleased liberal whites while reinforcing black self-respect, a virtually impossible task. But Lischer usefully reminds us that King faced Du Bois’s famed dilemma of twoness—to be “an American, a Negro.”19 Even in this light, mask wearing or self-making need not be read as mere duplicity. Instead, it may be viewed as a renewal of the ancient black effort to survive through creating durable, flexible personalities. Making selves and wearing masks is not merely a defensive device to deter white intrusion. It is also the positive means by which blacks shape their worlds and make their identities. Lischer is right to argue that Miller’s reading skews King’s later, more radical preaching by not attending to the sermons and speeches that rarely made it to print. And he renders invaluable service by excavating a neglected version of King’s public persona that remains buried beneath the rubble of feel-good rhetoric that distorts his memory. Like Miller, Lischer shows us how King used rhetorical formulas to argue for racial justice, but with a different bent. He explores how King ingeniously employed the rhythms, cadences, and colloquialisms of the black vernacular to inspire his black audiences to disobey unjust laws. Thus, King made speech a handmaiden of social revolution.
Both authors’ arguments illumine King’s borrowing habits by placing his speech making and sermon giving in broad cultural and racial context. Black preachers—for that matter, all preachers—liberally borrow themes, ideas, phrases, and approaches from one another, although most would not pass off in print a sermon heavily borrowed from another preacher as their own. But many of the same preachers would not hesitate to preach a heavily borrowed sermon in their pulpits. Many critics are skeptical about the claim that speech is so freely shared in black communities, and even more skeptical of the notion that cribbing others’ work is such a common practice.20 But in an oral culture where, as Miller argues, authority is prized above originality, the crucial issue is not saying something new by saying something first, but in embracing the paradoxical practice of developing one’s voice by trying on someone else’s voice, and thus learning by comparison to identify one’s own gift. If imitation and emulation are the first fruits of such an oral culture, its mature benefits include the projection of a unique style—a new style—that borrows from cultural precedents but finds its own place within their amplifications.
King spoke much the way a jazz musician plays, improvising from minimally or maximally sketched chords or fingering changes that derive from hours of practice and performance. The same song is never the same song, and for King, the same speech was certainly never the same speech. He constantly added and subtracted, attaching a phrase here and paring a paragraph there to suit the situation. He could bend ideas and slide memorized passages through his trumpet of a voice with remarkable sensitivity to his audience’s makeup. King endlessly reworked themes, reshaped stories, and repackaged ideas to uplift his audience or drive them even further into a state of being—whether it was compassion or anger, rage or reconciliation—to reach for justice and liberation. King had a batch of rhetorical ballads, long, blue, slow-building meditations on the state of race, and an arsenal of simmering mid-tempo reflections on the high cost of failing to fix what fundamentally ails us—violence, hatred, and narrow worship of tribe and custom. King knew how to play as part of a rhetorical ensemble that reached back in time to include Lincoln and Jefferson and stretched across waters to embrace Gandhi and Du Bois in Ghana.21 But he played piercing solos as well, imaginatively riffing off themes eloquently voiced by black preachers Prathia Hall and Archibald Carey.22 In the end, King brilliantly managed a repertoire of rhetorical resources that permitted him to play an unforgettable, haunting melody of radical social change.
Even if one holds that King’s creative uses of borrowed words amounted to verbal theft (a view I heartily reject), one might still conclude that, in King’s case, there was a moral utility to an immoral act. A greater good was served by King’s having used the words of others than might otherwise have been accomplished had he not done so. This utilitarian calculus takes into account Miller’s insistence that King was weighed down23 with so much to do that it would have been impossible for him to achieve the worthy goal of racial revolution without appealing to such resources. And even if one concludes that King’s unattributed use of sentences and paragraphs from others’ sermons in his printed sermons was plagiarism (a view I do hold), one can still acknowledge the pressures under which King performed—not simply pressures of time and commitment, but the pressure to resist white supremacy in a manner that maintained black dignity while appealing to white conscience. As if that were not formidable enough, King also had to balance the militant demand for social change early on while making certain that the manner in which black folk demanded their due would not lead to mass black destruction. Given such pressures and in the light of King’s moral aims, it is certainly not unforgivable to produce a book of sermons, Strength to Love, that includes unacknowledged sources.24 In fact, there is some poetic justice in King’s use of orthodox liberal ideas to undermine orthodox racial beliefs and even more justice in his having breathed new life into these words while expanding their moral application, fulfilling them in ways their owners might never have conceived but to which they would certainly have no objections. As Lischer argues, Strength to Love was published to consolidate King’s white liberal audience, a goal he certainly achieved.25 But as Lischer also notes, unedited audiotapes of King’s sermons and speeches26 are not only more representative of King’s rhetorical output, but are a more reliable index of his sophisticated oral practices. In the main, King was more Miles Davis than Milli Vanilli.27
King’s academic work is another matter altogether. From the scant evidence that exists, even in his undergraduate days at Morehouse College, King was sloppy in formally citing the sources of ideas he propounded in his papers.28 King began college at age fifteen, swept in on an early admissions policy for bright students to compensate for the drain of black men during World War II. King graduated from college at nineteen, the same age at which he preached his trial sermon.29 The sermon that King would preach that night became one of his favorite homilies and was greatly dependent on a sermon by a well-known white minister. King sailed into seminary with supreme confidence, the son of a solidly middleclass minister whose future promise had begun to blossom as he embraced graduate school at an age when most male students were gearing up for girls and guzzling beer. King’s work at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, was often distinguished enough to earn him high marks from his professors (except, ironically enough, in a couple of public speaking courses)30 and the confidence of fellow students, who voted him class president. But King’s formal citation habits continued to be sloppy.31 In most cases, his errors might have easily been corrected had he taken more time to place quotation marks around material amply cited in his notes and had he refined his skills of paraphrasing others’ work. King’s work at Crozer, especially his use of books and articles from which he drew many of his ideas, proves that he used these sources to bolster his burgeoning theological beliefs about God, human nature, evil, and sin.
The same holds true for his work at Boston University, where King matriculated after graduating from Crozer. Initially enrolled in the philosophy department to work with renowned philosophical theologian Edgar Brightman, King transferred to the school of theology when Brightman died. There King worked under the tutelage of L. Harold DeWolf and, to a lesser degree, S. Paul Schilling, both of whom were influenced by Brightman’s conception of personalism, which holds that God is a living being with the characteristics of human personality. King put his own stamp on personalist theology32 even as he wrestled with other great theological and philosophical figures, some of whom he first read in seminary—Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich, and Wieman. Throughout his Boston University career, it is now evident that King plagiarized large portions of his course papers and his dissertation, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” completed in 1955.33 King plagiarized the two principal subjects of his dissertation, but the bulk of his theft concentrated on large portions of Jack Boozer’s dissertation, “The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich’s Conception of God,” written just three years before King’s thesis and supervised by L. Harold DeWolf, King’s major adviser.34 Interestingly, King used plagiarized thoughts to reinforce his theological convictions. He stole words for at least three reasons: first, to explore the character of a God who was personal and loving, and not simply, as Tillich argued, the “ground of being”; second, to investigate the complex nature of human identity and sinfulness, as King struggled between neo-orthodox theology, with its emphasis on original sin, and liberal religious views, which hold that myths and symbols dot the biblical landscape; and, finally, to probe the origin and persistence of evil—was it allowed by God, who in yielding to human will, decided to limit herself, or was God not really all-powerful?35 As historian Eugene Genovese notes, King’s plagiarism contained a “curious feature”36 since it was not characterized by “laziness and indifference” but showed that King “constantly wrestled with difficult subject matter.” And most of his teachers agreed with his seminary professor’s assessment that King possessed “exceptional intellectual ability.”37 Moreover, there is no evidence that King cheated on his examinations, which he constantly passed with high marks. Then why did he plagiarize?
No one knows, although many scholars and critics across the ideological spectrum have ventured reasons. Theodore Pappas’s edited volume, Martin Luther King Plagiarism Story, is a relentless assault on King’s reputation, a bitterly moralizing anthology that assays to unveil King’s moral deficits through his stolen words.38 Instead, Pappas’s tome, with the exception of contributions by Genovese, Gary Wills, and Jacob Neusner, is a throb of journalistic overkill with little relief or balance. Its ominous blue tones seek to warn us that King’s sordid act of intellectual treachery reveals his inherently flawed character—information intended, no doubt, to flatten King’s naive boosters. Pappas’s attack reveals just how persistent are the pockets of intellectualized attacks on Martin Luther King’s reputation in our nation, although he does document the reluctance of media and academic critics to publicize King’s plagiarism. King’s first scholarly biographer, David Levering Lewis, was “appalled” at the news of his virgin subject’s literary misdealings, decrying King’s “repeated act of self-betrayal and subversion of the rules of scholarship,” which, in the light of Lewis’s estimate of King’s ability, was wholly unnecessary.39 Lewis detects in King’s psychic makeup the “angst of strivers in the melting pot,” whether they came by immigration or slavery.40 He plausibly posits that an “alert striver” like King might have sensed a racial double standard in his professors’ treatment of him, and thus, “finding himself highly rewarded rather than penalized”41 for his apparent mistakes, “he may well have decide[d] to repay their condescension or contempt in like coin.” That may be true, although it may not help us understand why King cheated in the first place. Then, too, such a reading depends on denying that King’s scholarly habits were influenced by the verbal promiscuity of black culture, an argument Lewis finds “wholly incredulous.”42 Another exhaustive King biographer, David Garrow, is more willing than Lewis to concede the relevance of black cultural factors in understanding King’s practices, at least on the sermonic front. Garrow holds that the discovery of King’s plagiarism will not only “alter our understanding of the young Martin Luther King,”43 but that the consequences of such a finding will “complement and further strengthen two interpretive themes” that have found support among civil rights scholars. The first is that King “was far more deeply and extensively shaped”44 by the black church tradition that nurtured him than by the thinkers and teachers he engaged in graduate school. And second, “the black freedom movement was in no way the simple product of individual leaders and national organizations.”45 Like King scholars James Cone, Lewis Baldwin, and Taylor Branch, Garrow underscores the powerful influence of the black church on King’s theological framework and his habit of verbal borrowing.46 Although none of these scholars is an apologist for King’s scholarly plagiarism, they bring a vital balance to criticism that fails to acknowledge the cultural and racial forces that shaped King’s rhetorical choices.
Still, it is one thing to argue that King’s habits of verbal borrowing drew from cultural practices (which I think is true) and another to argue that King simply carried these habits into the academic arena. Such an argument dishonors King’s sophistication and shrewdness and ignores the intellectual gifts and scholarly talents that got King admitted to graduate school in the first place. But even those who argue that King’s academic habit of taking others’ words without attribution was pure and simple plagiarism (which I believe it was) have unconvincing arguments about what drove him to do it. The suggestion that King’s teachers gave him a break because he was black—that they engaged in “reverse racism” or, even worse, as Lewis and Genovese argue, that his professors engaged in racial paternalism—seems implausible.47 After all, Boston University produced, during or immediately after King’s tenure, distinguished scholars like Major Jones, Samuel Proctor, Evans Crawford, Cornish Rogers, and C. Eric Lincoln.48 That does not rule out the possibility that King’s case was an exception, but for that logic to work, King would had to have been a marginal student whose limited skills prevented his success. There is too much evidence that King mastered the mechanics of academic survival and was bright, diligent, and highly disciplined. David Garrow’s surmise that King was in his Boston years “first and foremost a young dandy whose efforts to play the role of a worldly, sophisticated young philosopher were in good part a way of coping with an intellectual setting that was radically different from his own heritage and in which he might well have felt an outsider,”49 may go further in capturing King’s conflicting emotions about graduate school and his doubts about whether he belonged. The most highly gifted black student50 could harbor insecurities about his talents in a white world that insisted on his inferiority, even in a relatively benign environment like Boston University, which had a reputation for nurturing bright black students. Garrow suggests that the King of Boston University may have been “a rather immature and insecure man,”51 who did not fully become “himself” until he left graduate school, a reasonable speculation not only in the light of King’s subsequent career but in the light of how most of us who have trod a similar path have developed. (Did anyone really expect Michael Jordan to become the greatest basketball player ever after viewing him in college, where he never averaged twenty points a game?) We often forget that King was only twenty-six when he became what Hegel termed a world-historical figure.52 Boston University certainly was a proving ground for him, a place where he fought personal and institutional demons and succumbed to the temptation to represent others’ work as his own. I think there are at least two complex and interrelated reasons behind King’s scholarly plagiarism.
First, part of the explanation may reside in what Cornish Rogers, a contemporary of King at Boston University, says was King’s primary goal: to become a first-rate preacher and pastor of a distinguished black southern church. Rogers says that “King told me the main reason he was getting a doctorate was so he could get that church—Dexter Avenue, which wanted a minister with a doctorate.”53 Rogers says that despite the fact that King’s application for Boston University indicated his desire to become a scholar of theology, it was not surprising that King “changed his perspective as he got older and sensed where his real heart and best gifts lay.”54 This confirms Miller’s and Lischer’s arguments that King was first and foremost a preacher of extraordinary skill and resources, and by comparison, at best a competent theologian. Rogers also argues that theological education was “alien in the sense that it really did not provide [King] with the tools for ministry in the black community,”55 even though King would use “some of the titillating ideas that he got in his studies if he thought they would preach well.” For King, as for many “evangelical divines,” preaching was the supreme skill one must possess and develop to render the greatest service as a Christian minister. Among black preachers, there is the often repeated mantra dressed up as a question: “But can he tell the story?” referring to homiletical skills honed in the black pulpit. And, as Lischer argued about King, every item of experience is made grist for the preacher’s mill, as preachers often remark about a compelling story or idea “that will preach.”
Undoubtedly, there is a profound conflict in such circles about formal theological education. Although it is viewed as necessary to critical thinking about religious matters, theological education is often viewed as a hindrance to the true worship of God, since liberal scholarship in particular challenges evangelical faith. This skepticism often translates into a paralyzing anti-intellectualism, a phenomenon not unknown in black and white preaching circles. But even as such preachers despise the process of theological education—both its demanding intellectual regimen and its relentless criticism of received theological views—they cherish its value to their upward mobility and hunger after its symbolic rewards. This is why, perhaps, there are so many self-anointed, self-appointed, self-administered “doctors” in the Christian ministry, including the black pulpit (especially, perhaps, the black pulpit). The doctor deficiency among black clergy—the result of racist strictures against formal and higher education for most of our history—has led to its diseased exaggeration in such quarters. King certainly got major cachet from his degree.56 How many times would black folk derive pride from announcing that their leader was “Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.,” almost as if his title were part of his given name? And liberal white folk were pleased with themselves in pronouncing a title that King had collected from one of their schools. Calling him “Doctor King” was a way for them to participate vicariously in his achievement while perhaps unconsciously lauding themselves for having had the good sense to recognize his gifts. The anti-intellectualism of the clergy, the alienation of a white academic setting, the appeal of becoming a “doctor,” the desire to serve the black church, and a change in vocational aspiration in midstream might certainly have ganged up on a young black scholar who sought to relieve the intense pressure of being simultaneously vain, gifted, ambitious, and insecure. Neither can we gainsay King’s pride in being able to pull it all off—not simply the deception that the work he stole was his, which wasn’t difficult (after all, as his dissertation’s second reader, S. Paul Schilling commented, there were other student-scholars whose plagiarism was far worse than King’s)57—but the more difficult task of managing the competing demands of two worlds that, in the words of Bernice Johnson Reagon, King sought to “straddle.”58 In this sense, King’s plagiarism, though still tragic, was among the least of his worries. That is a profound commentary on the racist world King sought to penetrate, the conflicted black world from which he emerged, and the uncertain world into which he would be thrust as an educated agent of social change. Not to get the degree would be a greater failure than cheating to get it. The fault lies not simply with King, although he bears a lion’s share of the blame, but with a world that demanded that he and others perform under such conditions. The wonder is not that King cheated under these conditions, but that C. Eric Lincoln, Samuel Proctor, Evans Crawford, Cornish Rogers, Major Jones, and thousands of other blacks, did not.
Second, King’s plagiarism may have had to do with his aversion, one shared by many black students of his generation, to write a dissertation on race.59 Of course, that aversion is not the driving force in King’s cheating but its symptom. The racial climate that made race a scholarly taboo and encouraged the embrace of already validated European subject matter might have been the predicate for his plagiarism. The aversion to write about race was not accidental, but reflected the dilemma that all black students faced: if they wrote about race, they risked being pigeonholed or stereotyped; if they avoided it, they risked failing to develop critical resources to combat arguments about black inferiority. Even today, such a stigma persists, particularly in the light of the bitter culture wars still being fought. For instance, Eugene Genovese, in an otherwise tough and eminently fair review of King’s work, let slip that “King passed over the chance to take courses on social Christianity, Gandhi, race relations, and other trendy subjects, preferring courses on Plato, Hegel, formal logic, and modern philosophy.”60 If such courses were deemed trendy then, it is no wonder that rigorously exploring the ideas that pushed or prevented racial justice would be strongly discouraged in white academic settings. At Boston University, the stigma of “race scholar” was one that few students appeared willing to risk. As James Cone notes, King did “not even mention racism in most of his graduate papers that dealt with justice, love, sin, and evil.”61 Cone also argues that in “six years at Crozer and Boston, King never identified racism as a theological or philosophical problem or mentioned whether he recognized it in the student body and faculty.”62
Such issues were broached in the Dialectical Society, an organization of black graduate students founded by King and Cornish Rogers to offer their peers an intellectual forum to debate ideas relevant to black communities.63 The need for such a group underscores the schizophrenia that many black scholars faced, and often still do, in seeking to address the painful circumstances of black life while satisfying the demands of a white academy. Cone’s conclusion that King, like most other integrationists of his time, “appeared to be glad merely to have the opportunity to prove that Negroes could make it in the white man’s world,”64 is borne out by Rogers’s observation that “the only reason many students stuck around (and did everything that was required of them) was to get the degree which in the black community makes you equal to the man, to white folks, if you’ve got your degree from a white institution, the same degree that whites get.”65 In such an environment, King concluded that he would never set the world on fire with his scholarly gifts. And as he perhaps battled his own self-doubt in confronting the rigorous demands of scholarly work—work he couldn’t do as well as the work his genius had suited him for in the pulpit and the public stage, work of which he was not yet fully aware or capable—it is likely that cheating became a way to save face back home, satisfy “the man” at school, and sail off into the sunset of pastoral duties with no one having been the wiser about his grave sin. After all, as David Levering Lewis points out, no one, not even King himself, knew then that he would become Martin Luther King Jr.66 Neither did King or, for that matter, his admirers and detractors, realize that his failures, like his successes, would gain such wide attention.
Recent scholarship in the psychology of race may provide a small glimpse onto King’s tortured psychic landscape. This is by no means an attempt to excuse King’s misdeed. Neither is it an attempt to suggest that most of those blacks victimized by the problem I will discuss would ever resort to stealing others’ words as their own. Still, I think it opens a window onto King’s mental processes that might help us understand a bit better why he cheated. Studies by Stanford University psychologist Claude Steele and his colleagues suggest the existence of a problem that King most likely engaged.67 Steele and his colleagues have attempted to answer a difficult question: Why do able black college students fail to perform as well as their white colleagues? Throughout the 1990s, Steele says, “the national college-dropout rate for African-Americans has been 20 to 25 percent higher than that for whites. Among those who finish college, the grade-point average of black students is two thirds of a grade below that of whites.”68 Steele says that “the under-performance of black undergraduates is an unsettling problem” that may “alter or hamper career development, especially among blacks not attending the most selective schools.”69
Steele says the answers have resulted in an often “uncomfortably finger pointing . . . debate. Does the problem stem from something about black students themselves, such as poor motivation, a distracting peer culture, lack of family values, or—the unsettling suggestion of the The Bell Curve—genes?”70 Steele adds to that list a host of other factors relating to the “conditions of blacks’ lives: social economic deprivation, a society that views blacks through the lens of diminishing stereotypes and low expectation, too much coddling, or too much neglect?” What stumped researchers even more is that middle-class black students, who have had the social and economic resources to lift them above the social plight of their poorer peers, underperform as do disadvantaged blacks, garnering lower standardized-test scores, lower college grades, and lower graduation rates than their white peers. What forces could possibly account for such underperformance, even among middle-class black students? At the risk of oversimplifying and reducing Steele’s argument, it all boils down to what he and his colleagues termed “stereotype threat”: the “threat of being viewed through the lens of negative stereotype, or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype.”71
Steele develops his theory to apply to differential performance among black undergraduate students and their white peers. I apply it to King’s own possible mind-set and suggest that he cheated in part to escape or relieve “stereotype threat”—the enormous pressure of feeling under relentless white scrutiny and living with the fear of confirming stereotypes of black identity. In a telling passage, nineteen-year-old graduate student King (at an age when most young men are college sophomores) is described as being
terribly tense, unable to escape the fact that he was a Negro in a mostly white world. He was painfully aware of how whites stereotyped the Negro as lazy and messy, always laughing, always loud and late. He hated that image and tried desperately to avoid it. “If I were a minute late to class,” he said, “I was almost morbidly conscious of it and sure that everyone noticed it. Rather than be thought of as always laughing, I’m afraid I was grimly serious for a time. I had a tendency to overdress, to keep my room spotless, my shoes perfectly shined and my clothes immaculately pressed.”72
King was certainly not alone as a black student who confronted an egregiously unfair academic situation. Neither can we be sure that he wasn’t simply the sort of person who would have cheated no matter his race or age. But since we only know him as we did—a black man confronting his self-doubt in a majority white culture—we can only reasonably speculate with the facts at hand. From King’s own description of the psychic and emotional torture he confronted, I think it is reasonable to suggest that a possible reason for his cheating had to do with the attempt to please the white professors who judged him and to measure up to the standards of the white society in which he competed academically. I am not suggesting that most black students respond similarly; they obviously do not. I am, however, arguing that it is plausible that King responded to stereotype threat, perhaps even “stereotype fatigue,” and surrendered the fight on the academic end to preserve his mental health on the emotional end. The fight was just that costly that plagiarizing course papers and a dissertation—as awful and lethal a flaw as it is—was deemed less harmful than facing the consequences of failing to meet the challenges of the white world.
King’s plagiarism at school is perhaps a sad symptom of his response to the racial times in which he matured. His plagiarism is made even sadder by the realization that King’s heroic efforts as a civil rights leader relieved for others some of the pressures that he faced as a graduate student, pressures that no one should have to face but that thousands of blacks have managed with amazing grace. It is not unbelievable that such figures were gifted, but that they could perform under the punishing conditions of rigid racial apartheid. Their success deflects attention from the horror of the conditions they learned to master. It is bitterly ironic that of all people, Martin Luther King, Jr., should be found out as a plagiarist since his huge rhetorical gifts helped to create a world of opportunity for millions. But then his genius for mastering the white world through mastering its languages, and for portraying so compellingly the pained psychic boundaries of black life, may derive from the tortured memory of his sore temptation on an isolated battlefield of conscience where he wrestled with, and failed, himself. As a New York Times editorial eloquently reminded our nation, King may have plagiarized words, but he could never plagiarize the courage he displayed on countless occasions:
But however just it may be to denounce his scholarship,73 that should not be confused with his leadership. Whether or not, as a student, he wrote what he wrote, Dr. King did what he did. . . . Some say he solicited the assistance of others . . . but even if so, that’s no more to be faulted than John Kennedy turning to Theodore Sorensen, or George Bush to Peggy Noonan. . . . What the world honors when it honors Dr. King is his tenacity on behalf of racial justice—tenacity equally against gradualism and against violence. He and many with him pushed Americans down the long road to racial justice. That achievement glows unchallenged through the present shadow. Martin Luther King’s courage was not copied; and there was no plagiarism in his power.