I have a question though. Recently, I ran into someone who claimed that MLK plagiarized a lot of the things he wrote. He was a white lolbertarian, so I'm reluctant to believe him to say the least. Has anyone else heard about this? Is there any merit to the claim? If it is complete bullshit, when did it start?
The King's Papers Project at Stanford apparently has a lot more examples of borrowed bits of other people's sermons from throughout his career as well, but I can't find any clear indication of how much or how frequently.
From what I could find, there was material taken too directly from other works in his thesis, but he was upfront about the sources he used. So it sounds like bad form academically, but no attempt at conspiracy.
And all the claims about his speeches being plagiarized have been complete nonsense.
And if there's one thing I learned from all my seminars and training with plagiarism as a grad student and teacher, it's that plagiarism is not a clear-cut issue and sometimes can be pretty damn complicated, depending on the circumstances.
Heck, I technically plagiarized once when I transferred a paper from disk to computer and all my quotation marks were gone. I had to go through and replace them and missed two. Thankfully my prof caught it and let me put a few ink marks on the paper to make it clear.
Scroll down to #2; it addresses the claim of plagiarism and the claim that his "I Have a Dream" speech was also plagiarized. Basically, there is evidence to support that he copied large portions of other writers' works and pasted them into his dissertation verbatim without attributing them properly, but this could have either been done intentionally or it could be that he simply didn't document them properly. The investigative committee concluded that he didn't seem to be willfully plagiarizing and rather that he simply didn't know how to cite correctly. His copied pieces are not analysis or substantive work; rather, he copied passages from the works he was analyzing, so they ruled that his work still contributed to the field and didn't revoke his PhD. (This was also after his death, so he wasn't around to defend himself.)
As for the speech, there are only two stylistic similarities between the speeches. It's pretty clear he composed most of the speech himself.
Well, the university MLK got his doctoral accreditation from has apparently been asked that question a lot...they admit pretty freely that some of his thesis for his Ph.D in theology might have been plagiarised.
And he was well known even in lifetime for 'borrowing' particularly stirring bits of speeches by other civil rights activists. Compare the end of the I Have A Dream speech...
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, 'My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.' And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring
( ... )
I have a question though. Recently, I ran into someone who claimed that MLK plagiarized a lot of the things he wrote. He was a white lolbertarian, so I'm reluctant to believe him to say the least. Has anyone else heard about this? Is there any merit to the claim? If it is complete bullshit, when did it start?
Reply
Reply
Reply
And all the claims about his speeches being plagiarized have been complete nonsense.
Reply
Heck, I technically plagiarized once when I transferred a paper from disk to computer and all my quotation marks were gone. I had to go through and replace them and missed two. Thankfully my prof caught it and let me put a few ink marks on the paper to make it clear.
Reply
http://www.cracked.com/article_17198_5-great-men-who-built-their-careers-plagiarism.html
Reply
Scroll down to #2; it addresses the claim of plagiarism and the claim that his "I Have a Dream" speech was also plagiarized. Basically, there is evidence to support that he copied large portions of other writers' works and pasted them into his dissertation verbatim without attributing them properly, but this could have either been done intentionally or it could be that he simply didn't document them properly. The investigative committee concluded that he didn't seem to be willfully plagiarizing and rather that he simply didn't know how to cite correctly. His copied pieces are not analysis or substantive work; rather, he copied passages from the works he was analyzing, so they ruled that his work still contributed to the field and didn't revoke his PhD. (This was also after his death, so he wasn't around to defend himself.)
As for the speech, there are only two stylistic similarities between the speeches. It's pretty clear he composed most of the speech himself.
Reply
And he was well known even in lifetime for 'borrowing' particularly stirring bits of speeches by other civil rights activists. Compare the end of the I Have A Dream speech...
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, 'My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.' And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring ( ... )
Reply
Leave a comment