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

by Theodore Pappas

Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Other Prominent Americans by Theodore Pappas 1998 Paperback 0-87319-045-9 This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0873190459
• ISBN13: 9780873190459
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Hallberg Publishing Corporation
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

"Voice-merging" is nothing new

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a PLAGIARIST as Pappas thoroughly documents in this important work. That Pappas was one of the few within the academy to outright condemn King's blatant plagiarism points to the generally sorry condition of the American intellectual tradition on many campuses today. Pappas reviews the history of this case of plagiarism by a venerated civil rights leader and concludes with a mention of the irony of it all, "the King estate now enforces copyrights and demands royalties on work which King often stole in the first place . . . [from] the scores of other writers, ministers, scholars, and social activists whose work fell prey to King's 'voice merging'." Of course, voice merging is nothing new. Wordthievery has been going on for as long as anybody can remember since the good ole days of frat-house file sharing on up to the modern paper databases and online paper "editing" and "research services". What King did is really no different from what many others have done--he just got caught for it, as Pappas notes, when his papers were turned over to scholars for research purposes (bad idea!!!--for King's legacy, anyhow). This book is worth every penny. It oughta be on every public library shelf across the country. But censorship, threats--including death threats--claims of racism (unfounded--Pappas fairly assesses King's plagiarism), and other techniques for distorting the truth will continue to muddy the waters for those wanting to find out about these plagiarism charges. Why did such a scholar have such a difficult time finding a publisher? Why have there been such vocal opponents of this fair-minded scholar simply for writing the truth about Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr. ? Important questions that demand an answer. A "brave book" indeed as Eugene Genovese notes in his forward. All the more so in the current stifling, censoring, intimidating, suffocating atmosphere created by the "complacency of the multicultural left". They hate this book! They don't want you to read this book! Buy a copy, check it out from your local library (if it hasn't been removed by a misguided multicultural lefty), sit down, take a deep breath, and read this brave book. You'll be astonished, quite possibly outraged, and most certainly not disappointed. It's not about race at all. It's about more basic things such as intellectual honesty, cribbing, textual thievery, discipline-specific (theology in King's case) incompetency, and a cover-up sham perpetrated by members of academia whose knees knocked together for fear of revealing what they had discovered. Dr. Herbert Ulysses Quickwit

The Loss of Intellectual Integrity

A very honest and forthright book. Should be required reading in any course concerning Dr King.

Just the facts, ma'am: modern plagiarism anatomized

The great thing about Theodore Pappas' account is its transparent fair-mindedness. Pappas is interested solely in the ramifications of intellectual corruption; he isn't an apparatchik at all. Thus, his scrupulously documented account of MLK's (and other late-twentieth-century demigods') mania for literary theft can't be accused of ideological axe-grinding. He sets out the facts in the most sober manner possible. Moreover, his style is clear, trenchant and unassuming all at once.

Sobering

Theodore Pappas' book is a devastating look at the state of academia and "scholarship." The treatment of MLK, Jr's dissertation is especially troubling.

Copy Cats

For the past eight years, intellectual sleuth Theodore Pappas, the former managing editor of Chronicles magazine, has hunted down prominent incidents of plagiarism, most notably those involving the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. His book operates on four levels: as a scholarly investigation into whether King plagiarized his 1955 Boston University doctoral dissertation; as an inquiry into the conduct of the guardians of the King legacy (Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson, the King family, et al.); as a study of the academic-publishing-media image complex that connived with the guardians to cover up the scandal; and as a brief history of plagiarism, from its 18th-century origins to its present status in an academic world lacking intellectual integrity.Pappas emphasizes that Martin King, as the younger King was known, was a great and courageous, though flawed human being. However, in recent years an idolatrous movement has developed that has implicitly removed King from the ranks of the human.Pappas shows that King's compulsive coveting of other men's words went back at least to his undergraduate days at Atlanta's Morehouse College, and continued at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University. "King's plagiarisms grow more sweeping with each year he progresses in higher education." Ultimately, King stole the most dramatic passages of his speech, "I Have a Dream," from an address by the Rev. Archibald Carey at the 1952 Republican Convention.Pappas prints extensive parallel excerpts from King's student papers at Morehouse, on through his Boston University doctoral dissertation, and their sources. BU officials eventually admitted that King had pilfered one-third of his dissertation from Jack Stewart Boozer's 1952 Boston University dissertation. (Evidently, 1952 was a very good year!) But first the predominantly white, politically diverse Friends of Martin went on the offensive: They lied, denied, and sought to silence the whistleblowers.From 1987-90, Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project, deliberately misled journalists. And instead of simply comparing the dissertations in his own school's library, Boston University President Jon Westling unquestioningly accepted Carson's claims, insisting in 1990 that "not a single instance of plagiarism of any sort has been identified."Mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, New Republic, Washington Post, and Atlanta Journal/Constitution, sat on the story for a year, and only ran it after a mealy-mouthed report appeared in The Wall Street Journal, one year after the British Sunday Telegraph had told the entire story.And then there is Keith Miller. A white composition instructor at Arizone State University, Miller espouses a theory of "voice merging," which holds that blacks cannot commit plagiarism, because the black oral tradition does not recognize intellectual property rights, and that King merely took the words of white men