The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (40 page)

As Miller and Lischer make clear, King’s borrowing had a noble purpose. For Miller, it was nothing less than the reflection back to liberal white America of the ideals it cherished in comforting and familiar language.
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For Lischer, King’s borrowing helped to subvert the status quo as King’s speech progressively filled with rage in denouncing racial optimism.
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Miller is right to emphasize King’s brilliant reworking of white liberal religious themes and to suggest that King’s success, at least the success of his early years, was surely linked to the perception by liberal whites that he and, by extension, most other blacks, was very much like them. King possessed the unique ability to convince liberal whites, through phrases and sermon plots they were familiar with, that black freedom was a legitimate goal because it was linked to social ideals they embraced each Sunday morning. By embracing liberal orthodoxy through the rhetoric of its main exponents, King was able to send the message that he and the blacks he represented were committed to the same goal of social reform as white Protestants. Miller also convincingly argues
that through the rhetoric at hand, King constructed a public persona—a social self—that expressed blackness in a fashion that appealed to the white mainstream.
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Lischer complains that Miller’s notion of self-making makes King appear duplicitous.
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But Miller discerns in King’s public persona the tough but inevitable choice that all minorities in a dominant culture face: how to put one’s best face forward. Given that King was concerned or, early on, even obsessed with what would work in white America, he was perhaps compelled to mold a public persona that pleased liberal whites while reinforcing black self-respect, a virtually impossible task. But Lischer usefully reminds us that King faced Du Bois’s famed dilemma of twoness—to be “an American, a Negro.”
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Even in this light, mask wearing or self-making need not be read as mere duplicity. Instead, it may be viewed as a renewal of the ancient black effort to survive through creating durable, flexible personalities. Making selves and wearing masks is not merely a defensive device to deter white intrusion. It is also the positive means by which blacks shape their worlds and make their identities. Lischer is right to argue that Miller’s reading skews King’s later, more radical preaching by not attending to the sermons and speeches that rarely made it to print. And he renders invaluable service by excavating a neglected version of King’s public persona that remains buried beneath the rubble of feel-good rhetoric that distorts his memory. Like Miller, Lischer shows us how King used rhetorical formulas to argue for racial justice, but with a different bent. He explores how King ingeniously employed the rhythms, cadences, and colloquialisms of the black vernacular to inspire his black audiences to disobey unjust laws. Thus, King made speech a handmaiden of social revolution.

Both authors’ arguments illumine King’s borrowing habits by placing his speech making and sermon giving in broad cultural and racial context. Black preachers—for that matter, all preachers—liberally borrow themes, ideas, phrases, and approaches from one another, although most would not pass off in print a sermon heavily borrowed from another preacher as their own. But many of the same preachers would not hesitate to preach a heavily borrowed sermon in their pulpits. Many critics are skeptical about the claim that speech is so freely shared in black communities, and even more skeptical of the notion that cribbing others’ work is such a common practice.
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But in an oral culture where, as Miller argues, authority is prized above originality, the crucial issue is not saying something new by saying something first, but in embracing the paradoxical practice of developing one’s voice by trying on someone else’s voice, and thus learning by comparison to identify one’s own gift. If imitation and emulation are the first fruits of such an oral culture, its mature benefits include the projection of a unique style—a new style—that borrows from cultural precedents but finds its own place within their amplifications.

King spoke much the way a jazz musician plays, improvising from minimally or maximally sketched chords or fingering changes that derive from hours of practice and performance. The same song is never the same song, and for King, the same
speech was certainly never the same speech. He constantly added and subtracted, attaching a phrase here and paring a paragraph there to suit the situation. He could bend ideas and slide memorized passages through his trumpet of a voice with remarkable sensitivity to his audience’s makeup. King endlessly reworked themes, reshaped stories, and repackaged ideas to uplift his audience or drive them even further into a state of being—whether it was compassion or anger, rage or reconciliation—to reach for justice and liberation. King had a batch of rhetorical ballads, long, blue, slow-building meditations on the state of race, and an arsenal of simmering mid-tempo reflections on the high cost of failing to fix what fundamentally ails us—violence, hatred, and narrow worship of tribe and custom. King knew how to play as part of a rhetorical ensemble that reached back in time to include Lincoln and Jefferson and stretched across waters to embrace Gandhi and Du Bois in Ghana.
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But he played piercing solos as well, imaginatively riffing off themes eloquently voiced by black preachers Prathia Hall and Archibald Carey.
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In the end, King brilliantly managed a repertoire of rhetorical resources that permitted him to play an unforgettable, haunting melody of radical social change.

Even if one holds that King’s creative uses of borrowed words amounted to verbal theft (a view I heartily reject), one might still conclude that, in King’s case, there was a moral utility to an immoral act. A greater good was served by King’s having used the words of others than might otherwise have been accomplished had he not done so. This utilitarian calculus takes into account Miller’s insistence that King was weighed down
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with so much to do that it would have been impossible for him to achieve the worthy goal of racial revolution without appealing to such resources. And even if one concludes that King’s unattributed use of sentences and paragraphs from others’ sermons in his printed sermons was plagiarism (a view I do hold), one can still acknowledge the pressures under which King performed—not simply pressures of time and commitment, but the pressure to resist white supremacy in a manner that maintained black dignity while appealing to white conscience. As if that were not formidable enough, King also had to balance the militant demand for social change early on while making certain that the manner in which black folk demanded their due would not lead to mass black destruction. Given such pressures and in the light of King’s moral aims, it is certainly not unforgivable to produce a book of sermons,
Strength to Love,
that includes unacknowledged sources.
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In fact, there is some poetic justice in King’s use of orthodox liberal ideas to undermine orthodox racial beliefs and even more justice in his having breathed new life into these words while expanding their moral application, fulfilling them in ways their owners might never have conceived but to which they would certainly have no objections. As Lischer argues,
Strength to Love
was published to consolidate King’s white liberal audience, a goal he certainly achieved.
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But as Lischer also notes, unedited audiotapes of King’s sermons and speeches
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are not only more representative of King’s rhetorical output, but are a more reliable index of his sophisticated oral practices. In the main, King was more Miles Davis than Milli Vanilli.
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King’s academic work is another matter altogether. From the scant evidence that exists, even in his undergraduate days at Morehouse College, King was sloppy in formally citing the sources of ideas he propounded in his papers.
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King began college at age fifteen, swept in on an early admissions policy for bright students to compensate for the drain of black men during World War II. King graduated from college at nineteen, the same age at which he preached his trial sermon.
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The sermon that King would preach that night became one of his favorite homilies and was greatly dependent on a sermon by a well-known white minister. King sailed into seminary with supreme confidence, the son of a solidly middleclass minister whose future promise had begun to blossom as he embraced graduate school at an age when most male students were gearing up for girls and guzzling beer. King’s work at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, was often distinguished enough to earn him high marks from his professors (except, ironically enough, in a couple of public speaking courses)
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and the confidence of fellow students, who voted him class president. But King’s formal citation habits continued to be sloppy.
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In most cases, his errors might have easily been corrected had he taken more time to place quotation marks around material amply cited in his notes and had he refined his skills of paraphrasing others’ work. King’s work at Crozer, especially his use of books and articles from which he drew many of his ideas, proves that he used these sources to bolster his burgeoning theological beliefs about God, human nature, evil, and sin.

The same holds true for his work at Boston University, where King matriculated after graduating from Crozer. Initially enrolled in the philosophy department to work with renowned philosophical theologian Edgar Brightman, King transferred to the school of theology when Brightman died. There King worked under the tutelage of L. Harold DeWolf and, to a lesser degree, S. Paul Schilling, both of whom were influenced by Brightman’s conception of personalism, which holds that God is a living being with the characteristics of human personality. King put his own stamp on personalist theology
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even as he wrestled with other great theological and philosophical figures, some of whom he first read in seminary—Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich, and Wieman. Throughout his Boston University career, it is now evident that King plagiarized large portions of his course papers and his dissertation, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” completed in 1955.
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King plagiarized the two principal subjects of his dissertation, but the bulk of his theft concentrated on large portions of Jack Boozer’s dissertation, “The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich’s Conception of God,” written just three years before King’s thesis and supervised by L. Harold DeWolf, King’s major adviser.
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Interestingly, King used plagiarized thoughts to reinforce his theological convictions. He stole words for at least three reasons: first, to explore the character of a God who was personal and loving, and not simply, as Tillich argued, the “ground of being”; second, to investigate the complex nature of human identity and sinfulness, as King struggled between neo-orthodox theology,
with its emphasis on original sin, and liberal religious views, which hold that myths and symbols dot the biblical landscape; and, finally, to probe the origin and persistence of evil—was it allowed by God, who in yielding to human will, decided to limit herself, or was God not really all-powerful?
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As historian Eugene Genovese notes, King’s plagiarism contained a “curious feature”
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since it was not characterized by “laziness and indifference” but showed that King “constantly wrestled with difficult subject matter.” And most of his teachers agreed with his seminary professor’s assessment that King possessed “exceptional intellectual ability.”
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Moreover, there is no evidence that King cheated on his examinations, which he constantly passed with high marks. Then why did he plagiarize?

No one knows, although many scholars and critics across the ideological spectrum have ventured reasons. Theodore Pappas’s edited volume,
Martin Luther King
Plagiarism Story
, is a relentless assault on King’s reputation, a bitterly moralizing anthology that assays to unveil King’s moral deficits through his stolen words.
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Instead, Pappas’s tome, with the exception of contributions by Genovese, Gary Wills, and Jacob Neusner, is a throb of journalistic overkill with little relief or balance. Its ominous blue tones seek to warn us that King’s sordid act of intellectual treachery reveals his inherently flawed character—information intended, no doubt, to flatten King’s naive boosters. Pappas’s attack reveals just how persistent are the pockets of intellectualized attacks on Martin Luther King’s reputation in our nation, although he does document the reluctance of media and academic critics to publicize King’s plagiarism. King’s first scholarly biographer, David Levering Lewis, was “appalled” at the news of his virgin subject’s literary misdealings, decrying King’s “repeated act of self-betrayal and subversion of the rules of scholarship,” which, in the light of Lewis’s estimate of King’s ability, was wholly unnecessary.
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Lewis detects in King’s psychic makeup the “angst of strivers in the melting pot,” whether they came by immigration or slavery.
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He plausibly posits that an “alert striver” like King might have sensed a racial double standard in his professors’ treatment of him, and thus, “finding himself highly rewarded rather than penalized”
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for his apparent mistakes, “he may well have decide[d] to repay their condescension or contempt in like coin.” That may be true, although it may not help us understand why King cheated in the first place. Then, too, such a reading depends on denying that King’s scholarly habits were influenced by the verbal promiscuity of black culture, an argument Lewis finds “wholly incredulous.”
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Another exhaustive King biographer, David Garrow, is more willing than Lewis to concede the relevance of black cultural factors in understanding King’s practices, at least on the sermonic front. Garrow holds that the discovery of King’s plagiarism will not only “alter our understanding of the young Martin Luther King,”
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but that the consequences of such a finding will “complement and further strengthen two interpretive themes” that have found support among civil rights scholars. The first is that King “was far more deeply and extensively shaped”
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by the black church tradition that nurtured him than by the thinkers and teachers he engaged in graduate school. And second, “the black freedom movement was in no
way the simple product of individual leaders and national organizations.”
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Like King scholars James Cone, Lewis Baldwin, and Taylor Branch, Garrow underscores the powerful influence of the black church on King’s theological framework and his habit of verbal borrowing.
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Although none of these scholars is an apologist for King’s scholarly plagiarism, they bring a vital balance to criticism that fails to acknowledge the cultural and racial forces that shaped King’s rhetorical choices.