“Yeah, I did wonder what had happened,” I confessed.
“Well, the speaker before you had gone through the same routine in his speech,” she revealed. “And since the audience had just heard it, their response was certainly muted.”
“O-h-h-h-h,” I said. “Now I get it.”
Although I was friendly with the civil rights leader, I took it as a matter of pride to point out to my host that he had ripped me off, and not vice versa. As soon as my host’s comments hit my ears, I recalled that the civil rights leader’s wife had heard me preach a few months before at a black Baptist church, and since her husband couldn’t attend, she promised that she would give him a tape of my sermon. I had used my dramatic passage in that sermon, and of course, he had obviously listened to the tape and lifted my passage for his speeches. In spite of my brief fit of ego, I couldn’t stay sore at my colleague. After all, Baptist preachers are always ripping each other off and using the stories, illustrations, phrases, verbal tics, mannerisms—and in some cases, whole sermons—we glean from other preachers. That’s how we learn to preach; by preaching like somebody else until we learn how to preach like ourselves, when our own voice emerges from the colloquy of voices we convene in our homiletical imagination. And in the end, the only justification for such edifying thievery among preachers is that the Word is being preached and the ultimate Author of what we say is being glorified.
In fact, the line I had used about the civil rights leader having “killed everythang in there” was torn straight from the transcript2 of a thousand other conversations between black Baptist preachers congratulating one another for their rhetorical might. Then, too, I knew the humorous three-step rhetorical rule of citation by which many black Baptist preachers operate. The first time they repeat something they hear, they say, “like Martin Luther King said . . .” The second time they repeat it, they say, “like somebody said . . .” The third time they repeat it, they say, “like I always say . . .” None of this means that there aren’t rules of fair play—that one shouldn’t work exceedingly hard in preaching with a Bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other (an idea ripped off from theologian Karl Barth),3 that one shouldn’t hunt for inspiration in all sorts of unusual places, and that one shouldn’t feed one’s flock with the fruits of rigorous intellectual and spiritual engagement. At their best, the practices of black Baptist preachers4 remind us that knowledge is indeed communal, that rhetoric is shaped in the interplay of a rich variety of language users, and that what is old becomes new again by being recast in forceful and imaginative ways.
All of this is crucial if we are to make sense of the recent revelation that Martin Luther King, Jr., borrowed other people’s words in his published and preached sermons.5 Of course, nothing I have said can account for the even more disturbing charge that King was a plagiarist in his academic work. It is now clear that he plagiarized huge chunks of his dissertation and graduate school papers and that he carelessly cited sources in his seminary and undergraduate papers. This news is especially jarring to those who view King as an American original, a figure whose social vision came wrapped in brilliant metaphors and memorable phrases. The notion that a figure who commanded the English language with such authority was in truth a borrower of other people’s words is too hard for King’s admirers to swallow. For many Americans, King’s example is law, his words scripture. In fact, King’s memory has become a racial Esperanto. His life has been made into a moral language that allows whites to translate their hopes and fears about black life into meanings that black folk intuitively understand. Much of King’s power hinged on his use of language, indeed, his use as language. His moral authority was largely rooted in his unique ability to express eloquently the claims of black freedom.
In that light, understanding what King did with language—that is, getting at his complex rhetorical habits and the presuppositions he brought to his spoken and written work—will give us a better sense of how to judge his achievements and failures. By explaining how King absorbed and recycled rhetorical sources and how he creatively fused a variety of voices in finding his own voice, one may be charged with excusing his verbal theft by “converting King’s blemish into a grand achievement.”6 Worse yet, one may be charged with appealing to some mythic racial practice to justify his borrowing, but certainly not borrowed, genius. But that is to confuse explanation with justification. Such a conclusion clings desperately to the naive belief that we must ignore context and circumstance in making moral judgments.
King’s borrowing, and at times, outright theft, of others’ words must be viewed in two arenas: his sermons in the pulpit and in print, and his scholarly writing in the academy before that. The most sophisticated arguments to date about King’s use of language in the pulpit and in print have been made by scholars Keith D. Miller and Richard Lischer. Miller, in his insightful Voice of Deliverance, persuasively argues that King heavily borrowed from white liberal preachers in his published sermons to further the cause of civil rights.7 He ingeniously seized on the ethical and political dimensions of white liberal sermons—including their emphasis on the Christian social gospel, their antimilitarism, their critiques of capitalism and communism, and even their inchoate antiracism—to cast his own arguments for black emancipation in terms that white liberal listeners would find irresistible.8 By fusing his voice with white liberal voices, King practiced, in Miller’s term, the black oral art of “voice-merging,” an ancient practice in black religious circles.9 Miller argues that in such circles, speech is seen not as private but as communal property. In black oral culture black folk learn to refine rhetoric and shape identity by joining their voices to the voices of their ancestors and their contemporary inspirations. Thus, King didn’t view such an art as verbal theft but as a time-honored, community-blessed tradition with deep roots in black culture.
Richard Lischer agrees in substance with this aspect of Miller’s argument. His brilliantly argued The Preacher King explores the rich rhetorical resources that King inherited as a prince of the black church.10 While Miller analyzes King’s written sermons and speeches, Lischer pays close attention to King’s spoken word, poring over the unedited audiotapes and transcripts of King’s sermons and speeches. Lischer argues that King’s real voice was edited out of his published sermons11 as he and his publisher sought to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Where Miller finds virtue in such a strategy, Lischer smells trouble. Not only is King’s spoken voice missing—a voice full of cultural allusion, racial wisdom, and black rhythms that were muted under the dogma of pen and page—but his theological and ideological evolution—a full-blown radicalism that was especially apparent in his highly personal, magnificently improvised, and deeply colloquial black sermonizing—is completely whitewashed. Lischer disagrees with the notion that “in his plagiarism King was simply adhering to the standards of African-American . . . preaching.”12 He claims that it “is one thing to assert” that language is a shared commodity in black culture,13 which he concedes, but “it is quite another to translate that generalization into a rationale for academic falsification.” Finally, Lischer thinks that Miller overstates the extent to which King borrowed.14 After all, he argues, white liberal ministers borrowed freely from each other (Miller also makes this point).
Despite their disagreements, Miller and Lischer offer persuasive arguments about how King used his intellectual and rhetorical gifts to bring about social change. Both authors help us understand exactly how King went about the formidable task of drawing on black cultural and religious traditions while shaping a message of liberation that could sway the conscience of white America. By digging deep into the history of black oral traditions, they help us understand a much celebrated but little understood practice: black preaching. Their brilliant explorations of the mechanics, methods, and modes of black sacred rhetoric help us see that black preachers often give their listeners reason to hope and fuel to survive by spinning words into the Word. Black preachers coin phrases, stack sentences, accumulate
wise sayings, and borrow speech to convince black folk, as the gospel song says, to “run on to see what the end is gonna be.” King had a genius for knowing what intellectual and spiritual resources to bring together, and to know when such a fusion would make the most sense and the greatest impact on his hearers.
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.15 For Lischer, King’s borrowing helped to subvert the status quo as King’s speech progressively filled with rage in denouncing racial optimism.16 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.17
Lischer complains that Miller’s notion of self-making makes King appear duplicitous.18 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.”19 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.20 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.21 But he played piercing solos as well, imaginatively riffing off themes eloquently voiced by black preachers Prathia Hall and Archibald Carey.22 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 down23 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.24 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.25 But as Lischer also notes, unedited audiotapes of King’s sermons and speeches26 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.27
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.28 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.29 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)30 and the confidence of fellow students, who voted him class president. But King’s formal citation habits continued to be sloppy.31 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 theology32 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 1955.33 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.34 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?35 As historian Eugene Genovese notes, King’s plagiarism contained a “curious feature”36 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.”37 Moreover, there is no evidence that King cheated on his examinations, which he constantly passed with high marks. Then why did he plagiarize?
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 34