XPost: alt.politics.liberalism, soc.culture.kenya, alt.politics.nationalism.white
XPost: alt.war.civil.usa
From: rkoch@banmlkday.com

Review of The Martin Luther King. Jr., Plagiarism Story,
edited by Theodore Pappas, (Rockford, Illinois: The
Rockford Institute, 1994) 107 pages.
By T.E. Wilder
Contra Mundum, No. 11, Spring 1994

The fact that with our student body largely Southern in
constitution a colored
man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is
in itself no
mean recommendation. The comparatively small number of forward-
looking
and thoroughly trained negro leaders is, as I am sure you will
agree, still so
small that it is more than an even chance that one as adequately
trained as
King will find ample opportunity for useful service. He is
entirely free from
those somewhat annoying qualities which some men of his race
acquire when
they find themselves in the distinct higher percent of their
group.

The extract is from the letter of recommendation for Martin
Luther King which Crozer
Theological Seminary professor Morton Enslin wrote to Boston
University. (p. 87) As
one liberal to another, Enslin wanted to make clear that King
was their kind of negro. In it
we find the most significant key to understanding King's pre-
and post-mortem careers.
He was the liberals' boy.

This book is a collection of essays, letters and documents, most
of which appeared at
various times in Chronicles. The writers include the editor (of
both Chronicles and this
book), Theodore Pappas; journalist Frank Johnson of the London
Sunday Telegraph ;

Thomas Flemming; Jon Westling, Walter G. Muelder, and Peter Wood
of Boston
University; Peter Waldman of the Wall Street Journal; Charles
Babington (writing in The
New Republic); with a foreword by Jacob Neusner. The last, while
writing some of the
bluntest comments condemning the unprincipled publishing
industry and hypocritical
academy, is still typical of our time in his inability to come
to terms with actualities of
King's character and career. He speaks of “the authentic
achievements of Martin Luther
King, Jr.” and “the glories of his brief courageous life.” (p.
19)

What this book makes clear is that King, who came from a family
of shysters turned
preachers, began cheating, plagiarizing and otherwise lying when
in high school and
never gave it up. Lacking the aptitude for serious scholarly
work, in his passage through
various liberal schools, particularly theological seminary and
graduate school, he
expressed a devotion to the various icons of apostate theology
and socialist thought, and
the professors accounted this unto him for righteousness. There
were, as Enslin put it, few
“forward-looking and thoroughly trained negro leaders” (i.e.
churchmen processed and
accredited by apostate seminaries) and King showed that he knew
how to take direction
and fit into liberal circles. He was a man they could use.

It is easy to see the liberals' problem. While the black church
then was as replete with
scoundrels as it is today, they did not see liberal theology and
agitation as the basis for
their careers. As a result, the great mass of blacks in the
South were a barrier to the
liberals' social plans. Nor were there many leaders in the black
churches liberals could
use. (This has since been remedied, mainly by the enviable fame
and success of King and
his methods, but partly though lowering of academic standards to
augment the army of
properly indoctrinated and certified blacks). Men like King
could (and did, the liberals
were right) give the black churches a new direction, converting
them from obstacles to
liberal assets.

There are two things to be gained from reading this short book
for yourself. The first is an
appreciation of the massive scope of King's plagiarism, which
was certainly known in his
day. (The press did not think it would help the cause to report
it.) Presumably the
segregationists, since they did not capitalize on King's many
plagiarisms, were simply too
ignorant to recognize them.1

For it is not only in his dissertation that King plagiarized. He
did so as an undergraduate
in Morehouse College, and throughout his seven years of graduate
study, particularly in
papers in his major field, theology. King may simply have lacked
the talent to succeed
honestly in academics. “In fact, we know from his scores on the
Graduate Record Exam
that King scored in the second lowest third on his advanced test
in philosophy—the very
subject he would concentrate in at B.U.” (p. 88)

Once out of school King did not change. As with his habit of
sexual licentiousness, he
continued to plagiarize. He had to if he were to get where he
wanted. King's admirers
point to his eloquence as a significant aspect of his impact and
success. Yet, in his
academic work, “King's plagiarisms are easy to detect because
their style rises above the
level of his pedestrian student prose. In general, if the
sentences are eloquent, witty,
insightful, or pithy, or contain allusions, analogies,
metaphors, or similes, it is safe to
assume that the section has been purloined.” (p. 90)

King plagiarized in his books, Strength to Love Stride Toward
Freedom. Further:

1 This points to very significant problem for any group opposing
the program of the dominant culture. It
is the liberal establishment that owns the press and the
universities with all their reporters and
academics. They will research and publish what helps their
cause, wheather it is studies tending to
support the left or the dirty linen of the other side. Non-
liberals do not enjoy the advantages of this
intellectual “infrastructure” and the same few people must
combine activism and research and
publishing. Even then, they can get their ideas and discoveries
to the public only through marginal,
limited circulation publications. Compare the highly publicized
shootings of abortionists with the
scarcely reported violence of pro-abortion factions.

King's Nobel Prize Lecture, for example, is plagiarized
extensively from
works by Florida minister J. Wallace Hamilton; the section on
Gandhi and
nonviolence in his "Pilgrimage" speech are stolen virtually
verbatim from
Harris Wofford's speech on the same topic; the frequently
replayed climax to
the “I Have a Dream” speech—the “from every mountianside, let
freedom
ring” portion—is taken directly from a 1952 address to the
Republican
National Convention by a black preacher named Archibald Carey;
the 1968
sermon in which King prophesied his martyrdom was based on works
by J.
Wallace Hamilton and Methodist minister Harold Bosley; even the
“Letter

From Birmingham City Jail”, that “great American essay” so often

reproduced in textbooks on composition, is based on work by
Harry Fosdick,
H.H. Crane, and Harris Wofford.... (p. 94)2

The book's second lesson is the abject capitulation of academic
standards before the
demands of political correctness. This arises in two contexts:
the dishonesty of Boston
University administrators in the face of the plagiarism
revelations, and the cover-up by
the editors of the King papers at Emory University. Their first
position was indignant
denial, then came grudging limited admissions mixed with half-
truths designed to
mislead reporters, and finally a politically correct spin on the
story according to which
plagiarism (though they prefer other terms) is not so bad after
all when done by blacks.
Boston University appointed a committee:

As the committee concluded in its September 1991 report, because
King
plagiarized only 45 percent of the first half of his
dissertation and only 21
percent of the second, the thesis remains a legitimate and
“intelligent
contribution to scholarship” about which “no thought should be
given to the
revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree.” (p. 103)

The need to defend King's standing (and, it turns out, other
prominent black writers) led
to new critical theories of this special form of “discourse”. As
was earlier done with
pimping, plagiarism was elevated to a beautiful expression of
the flowering of black
culture.

It certainly promoted King's career. Wherever he was scheduled
to appear to mouth
liberal pronouncements before a backdrop of black marchers, the
tv cameras showed up,
making him the publicly visible leader of the negroes. It was
the sort of movement in
which being seen on TV as a leader amounted to being the leader

In time, however, new goals emerged for the radical black
movement, and new leaders,
less beholden to the older liberalism, appeared to promote these
goals. The movement
against us participation in Vietnam (it was pro-war, they simply
wanted the Communist
2 Many black “churchmen” demand that the “Letter from Birmingham
City Jail” be added to the Bible.
The plagiarism revelations have not led to a retraction.

side to win) also began to take away direction and momentum from
MLK's “leadership”.
King needed to reposition himself in front of his people. He
began to mouth the line of
the new left. US involvement in the Vietnam war was wrong, he
said, because it was a
war in which white people killed yellow people. Even worse,
white people made use of
blacks to kill yellow people. With his new racist arguments and
obvious sympathy for the
Communists King began to threaten the reputation and moral
credit he has amassed as the
spokesman for equality, integration and other notions liberals
had urged on Americans as
both good and harmless.

But just when King seemed about to destroy his immense value to
the liberals as a tool
acceptable to the white middle class, he was assassinated. As a
martyr he has been worth
a least twice as much to the liberals as he was alive. In death
King continues “free from
those somewhat annoying qualities which some men of his race
acquire”.

http://contra-mundum.org/cm/reviews/tw_plagiarism.pdf

Liberal Democrats had MLK killed to preserve their investment.
 

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