A coworker blurted out to another “did you know that Martin Luther King plagiarized his doctoral thesis?” and a black student assistant nearby never spoke to her again, setting her jaw tightly whenever she was in the same room.
Eddie Murphy said “Any of us black people can make people laugh at ourselves with comedy skits but we all know you don’t do any joking against Dr.King.”
I think it was in Chronicles magazine that I read two theses from the archive at the institution in question (B.U.?).
One was credited to King, and the other to a graduate from a decade or two earlier. The King text was identical to the older thesis--right down to some punctuation errors I noticed.