The Martin Luther King, Jr., Plagiarism Story

Upstream ^ | Jan-Feb 1996 | Barry Gross

[Bogolyubski]

Of course, the point you make about the multiple adulteries really points to a failure of dsicipline in whatever church King was ordained in. If things were working they way they were supposed to (according to scripture), King would have been de-frocked and possibly excommunicated. In all fairness, though, that church (sorry, I don't know which particluar demomination - other than Baptist of some sort) is by no means unique in such a failure - as the recent behavior of the American Catholic leadership regarding pedophile priests demonstrates. To their credit, the Assemblies of God defrocked Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart rather quickly.

[Servant of the Nine]

Offensive to whom? Doctor King isn't offended.

No, Dr. King, he dead.

What better time to question a man's integrity than on the day he is being recognized by this nation for his integrity.

He is being celebrated for contributions to civil rights. There can't be many adults left who think much of his integrity.

Your hyper, over practiced sensitivity is noted but misplaced.

Your lack of manners, good taste and discretion is almost enough to mark you as a liberal.

Maybe any public school which is named after Doctor King should have its name changed because of his plagiarism just as schools named for George Washington are being changed because of his flaws.

I think you are right. That discussion needs to be held, but it is ill mannered to hold it today.

I am a Southerner, and a conservative one. I try to live up to that by being a gentleman. You, sir, are not.

So9

[Servant of the Nine]

To their credit, the Assemblies of God defrocked Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart rather quickly.

Quickly when it made the TV News. Everyone in South Louisiana and SouthEast Texas had known about Jimmy Swaggert for a generation.

So9

[Bogolyubski]

An interesting response to this academic fraud perpetrated by Boston University might be to find someone who was denied a degree for a lesser percentage of plagarism and bring a lawsuit - citing their acceptance of King's. Force the leftists to defend their double standard in court. If someone can tap that leftist sinkhole for several million in punitive damages, so much the better.

[Right Wing Professor]

Hmmm. . . That works out to 33% "taken".

Besides, those numbers are misleading. He plagiarized others besides Boozer. The main body of his thesis is simply a series of chunks written by others, stitched together with an occasional conjunction or conjuctive phrases by King.

http://chem-gharbison.unl.edu/MLK/thesis.html

[traditionalist]

King wasn't a communist, but it's clear he had communist sympathies. I honestly don't know why he voted for Ike. My guess is that it was because Ike was pro-Civil Rights.

[Bogolyubski]

Well, you learn something new every day, as they say. So, despite their apparent failure to respond to Swaggart until it became national news, the Assembiles of God at least defrocked him - which is still more than one can say for the Baptists. In contrast to MLK, Swaggart is not held up as a moral leader or a saint by anyone.

King is a complicated character who is deserving of some serious study. Some of his earlier thoughts and statements were clearly within the American tradition of liberty - even anti- Communist. The real tragedy lies in his journey into the support of Marxism, abortion, and the system of racial dsicrimination now know by the Orwellian term "Affirmative Action." Given his ultimate views on these issues, it's really very silly for conservatives to claim King as one of their own.

[secretagent]

Good point about the courage. In regards to demonstrations against Jim Crow, Republicans don't have a single name to claim in the physical courage department, that I know of.

All the martyrs belonged to the left, as far as I know.

[DWPittelli]

I wrote" "After all, the Civil Rights movement was the last great and positive action of the Left in this country"

Then you wrote: "NO IT WAS NOT... The American right is just as responsible for the civil rights movement as is the left.... A greater proportion of Republicans (over 70%) than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

I am well aware of the fact that more Republicans than Dems voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, I was not talking about the 2 parties, or indeed about politicians at all. I was writing that the Civil Rights Movement -- the people who went on the Freedom Rides, or marched in the South, or belonged to SNCC -- was disproportionately made up of the Left. (Primarily Blacks and Jews. They were not Communists, opposing the CP for its servile pro-Soviet stance, and described themselves as New Leftists.)

I say this not to get in some left-wing political point; I am a small-"l" libertarian, albeit one who thinks we should overthrow Saddam.

I also recognize that some famous conservatives -- notably Charlton Heston -- marched with Dr. King. But that doesn't change my position that "the Civil Rights movement was the last great and positive action of the Left in this country." Which is, technically speaking, an attack on the left, since it means that their actions since then have been either puny or harmful.

[DWPittelli]

"An interesting response to this academic fraud perpetrated by Boston University might be to find someone who was denied a degree for a lesser percentage of plagarism and bring a lawsuit - citing their acceptance of King's. Force the leftists to defend their double standard in court. If someone can tap that leftist sinkhole for several million in punitive damages, so much the better."

I think that generally, while plagiarism will get a student tossed out, schools and universities are not in the habit of taking degrees back from people years after the fact. If they could, there would be havoc among all sorts of professionals, and we would all have to fear offending our alma mater, lest they remove our degree(s) and livelihood. It would also be impossible, I think, to prove that King's professors knew of his plagiarism before he got his degree.

[traditionalist]

I seem to remember reading the King's advisor also advised Boozer, the man whose disertation King plagiarized. The professor would have had to be a complete idiot not to see what was going on.

[Bogolyubski]

Yes, it did take courage to oppose injustice like the Jim Crow laws in places like Mississippi and Alabama in that time. That's what King started out doing. It is indeed a good thing that those unjust (and unconstitutional) laws were overturned. As many have pointed out, Republicans like Everett Dirksen of Illinois and were working to overturn Jim Crow long before King came on the scene. Unfortunately the Democrats were the majority party starting in 1932, so Jim Crow was allowed to linger on. King's tragedy is that he betrayed the principles of his youth much in the manner he betrayed the wife of his youth. He started out fighting injustice and ended up embracing hypocrasy and injustice. He was used and ultimately destroyed by the leftist machine.

The problem is this: A new set of unjust laws, which we can gather under the Orwellian term "affirmative action", are every bit as wrong as those that they replaced. They were wrong and unjust from the beginning. Worse, while Jim Crow was effective in parts - not all - of the country, AA is enforced nationwide with an iron fist. To top it off, we now have monstrosities like "hate crime" laws which utterly trash the idea of equal protection under the law. At the end of the day, I would not agree with your idea that we are better off. We're in about the same place in some respects that we were in 1950, except there are now different groups subjected to systematic injustice. In other respects, we are much worse off now because the moral underpinnings of the entire society have been undermined from within - not because of King (and others) fighting for liberty in the early days but because of the ultimate betrayal of the very ideals they started out fighting for.

[Coleus]

This may be a later version of the book below.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0873190459/reviews/qid=916138054/sr=1-1/102-3924598-0586542

Plagiarism and The Culture War : The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Other Prominent Americans

by Theodore Pappas, Theodore Pappas, Jacob Neusner, Eugene D. Genovese

[Bogolyubski]

The underpinnings of Jim Crow were immoral and unconstitutional, as I mentioned in my earlier post. Affirmative Action is basically a mirror image of Jim Crow - modified to fit leftist dogma. Affirmative Action, like its Jim Crow predecessor, is a corrosive and amoral policy that undermines the idea of equality under the law - a moral foundation of American society.

And, yes, the negative effect of discrimination is already starting to show after only 30 years. Lower income white males are now the least likely demographic group to enter college after high school. Many interviewed simply see little point in trying when they are basically locked out because of race. Asians have also been the target of AA programs, though there mercifully seems to be less of a negative effect on them thus far. The only positive thing to be said about Jim Crow was that it was uneven in both its presence and application, thus allowing some to escape. We aren't so fortunate with AA, which like all totalitarian programs, is ruthlessly applied on a national level.

[AnalogReigns]

I agree, it does matter, that this hero, was not so heroic after all...