Happy Rev. Dr. Plagiarist Day!

[Dickie Billericay]

Uncelebrate Plagiarism Day? Such a party pooper...

When a great man dies, the professors go through his works to prepare them for posterity. So it was with Mike King. The trouble was that the professors were aghast at what they found. Mike was a world-class plagiarist who stole just about everything that appeared in his name. Remember, I can't take credit for this discovery. I knew nothing about it. His staunchest supporters brought it to light.

Browse through a book entitled The Martin Luther King Jr. Plagiarism Story (Rockford Institute, Rockford, IL, 1994), by Theodore Pappas. In 1984, the "Martin Luther King Papers Project" was launched at Stanford University. In 1986, Professor David J. Garrow, in his book, Bearing the Cross, wrote that big chunks of King's Stride Towards Freedom are identical to passages from Paul Ramsay's Basic Christian Ethics and Anders Nygren's Eros and Agape.

It is important to note that Professor Garrow is a leftist, who admires Mike King. No doubt that was why he did not call what King had done plagiarism, and his index calls the incident "ghostwriting." No, David. A ghostwriter is someone who is hired to write something by the person whose name will appear on the cover as the author. A ghostwriter is not someone who steals what someone else writes and puts his own name on the cover. I have been a ghostwriter, but, because I was a ghost, I am not going to tell you what I wrote.

The King Papers project first discovered evidence of King's plagiarism in late 1987. In October, 1989, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Waldman, the professors discussed King's plagiarism in the presence of his widow, Coretta Scott King, in an all-day meeting in Atlanta. Mrs. King remained silent through most of the meeting, and thereafter declined to answer queries about her husband's thefts. The board decided to publish King's papers with footnotes fully detailing the plagiarism, and to publish a separate article outlining its extent.

By the way, have you watched a DVD movie at home lately? Isn"t the first thing that came up on your screen an announcement that the F.B.I. investigates copyright infringement -- which can even include infringement without monetary gain -- and that conviction could land you in prison for five years? It's a serious felony.

On December 3, 1989, Frank Johnson revealed in the British Sunday Telegraph, that Ralph Luker, associate editor of the King Papers Project, said King had "borrowed" heavily from the thesis of Jack Boozer, fellow Boston University theology student and later Professor of Religion at Emory. While Boozer was away in the military, Mike apparently committed the theft. In September, 1990, Thomas Fleming wrote in Chronicles that King's doctorate should be regarded as a courtesy title, because of the revelation that he plagiarized his dissertation.

If the truth got out, Boston University would have been humiliated. It is a short distance from B.U. to P.U. So, B.U. President Jon Westling sent a letter to Chronicles (published in the January 1991 issue) denying Fleming's charge. Westling said King's dissertation had been "scrupulously examined and reexamined by scholars," and that "not a single instance of plagiarism of any sort has been identified. . . . not a single reader has ever found any nonattributed or misattributed quotations, misleading paraphrases, or thoughts borrowed without due scholarly reference in any of its 343 pages." Hey, Jon, how long was your nose after you said all that? Just curious.

Claiborne Carson was director of the Project. He denied all charges until Peter Waldman said he had a copy of Boozer's dissertation. Then he caved. The story appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on November 9, 1990. The article quoted Claiborne Carson finally admitting King's plagiarism, but it calls his thievery "borrowings," and "voice merging" that derives from the oral traditions of the black church. No, plagiarism is not a tradition of the black church. Black preachers are not plagiarists.

The article says that "most of King's papers had many original thoughts," but often "borrowed without citing." According to Waldman, Carson was asking staff members to refrain from use of the "p" word at work. In short, even the author of the expose leaned over backward far enough to do an Olympic flip. Compare this treatment to what you know would be done to anyone else -- black, white or whatever -- who commits misrepresentation as outrageous as King's. At the very least, his degree would be rescinded.

Gerry Harbison was a professor of chemistry at the University of Nebraska. He was certainly not a "right-wing wacko." He was full of praise for the "civil rights movement."? Professor Harbison is worth quoting at length: "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.

"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.

". . . 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. Everything I've written above can easily be verified in a couple of hours in Love Library. None of it comes from right-wing scandalmongers who might have a vested interest in damaging King's reputation."

In other words, "Martin Luther King, Jr." was a fiction, a phantasm, manufactured and maintained by the Communists who chose him because of his oratorical talent, groomed him, used him, protected him and then (probably) eliminated him when exposure made him a liability. The "Martin Luther King, Jr." we were told about did not exist. Remember that we are talking about a man who has been honored above George Washington.

http://www.newswithviews.com/Stang/alan28.htm