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.38 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.39 Lewis detects in King’s psychic makeup the “angst of strivers in the melting pot,” whether they came by immigration or slavery.40 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”41 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.”42 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,”43 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”44 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.”45 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.46 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.
Still, it is one thing to argue that King’s habits of verbal borrowing drew from cultural practices (which I think is true) and another to argue that King simply carried these habits into the academic arena. Such an argument dishonors King’s sophistication and shrewdness and ignores the intellectual gifts and scholarly talents that got King admitted to graduate school in the first place. But even those who argue that King’s academic habit of taking others’ words without attribution was pure and simple plagiarism (which I believe it was) have unconvincing arguments about what drove him to do it. The suggestion that King’s teachers gave him a break because he was black—that they engaged in “reverse racism” or, even worse, as Lewis and Genovese argue, that his professors engaged in racial paternalism—seems implausible.47 After all, Boston University produced, during or immediately after King’s tenure, distinguished scholars like Major Jones, Samuel Proctor, Evans Crawford, Cornish Rogers, and C. Eric Lincoln.48 That does not rule out the possibility that King’s case was an exception, but for that logic to work, King would had to have been a marginal student whose limited skills prevented his success. There is too much evidence that King mastered the mechanics of academic survival and was bright, diligent, and highly disciplined. David Garrow’s surmise that King was in his Boston years “first and foremost a young dandy whose efforts to play the role of a worldly, sophisticated young philosopher were in good part a way of coping with an intellectual setting that was radically different from his own heritage and in which he might well have felt an outsider,”49 may go further in capturing King’s conflicting emotions about graduate school and his doubts about whether he belonged. The most highly gifted black student50 could harbor insecurities about his talents in a white world that insisted on his inferiority, even in a relatively benign environment like Boston University, which had a reputation for nurturing bright black students. Garrow suggests that the King of Boston University may have been “a rather immature and insecure man,”51 who did not fully become “himself” until he left graduate school, a reasonable speculation not only in the light of King’s subsequent career but in the light of how most of us who have trod a similar path have developed. (Did anyone really expect Michael Jordan to become the greatest basketball player ever after viewing him in college, where he never averaged twenty points a game?) We often forget that King was only twenty-six when he became what Hegel termed a world-historical figure.52 Boston University certainly was a proving ground for him, a place where he fought personal and institutional demons and succumbed to the temptation to represent others’ work as his own. I think there are at least two complex and interrelated reasons behind King’s scholarly plagiarism.
First, part of the explanation may reside in what Cornish Rogers, a contemporary of King at Boston University, says was King’s primary goal: to become a first-rate preacher and pastor of a distinguished black southern church. Rogers says that “King told me the main reason he was getting a doctorate was so he could get that church—Dexter Avenue, which wanted a minister with a doctorate.”53 Rogers says that despite the fact that King’s application for Boston University indicated his desire to become a scholar of theology, it was not surprising that King “changed his perspective as he got older and sensed where his real heart and best gifts lay.”54 This confirms Miller’s and Lischer’s arguments that King was first and foremost a preacher of extraordinary skill and resources, and by comparison, at best a competent theologian. Rogers also argues that theological education was “alien in the sense that it really did not provide [King] with the tools for ministry in the black community,”55 even though King would use “some of the titillating ideas that he got in his studies if he thought they would preach well.” For King, as for many “evangelical divines,” preaching was the supreme skill one must possess and develop to render the greatest service as a Christian minister. Among black preachers, there is the often repeated mantra dressed up as a question: “But can he tell the story?” referring to homiletical skills honed in the black pulpit. And, as Lischer argued about King, every item of experience is made grist for the preacher’s mill, as preachers often remark about a compelling story or idea “that will preach.”
Undoubtedly, there is a profound conflict in such circles about formal theological education. Although it is viewed as necessary to critical thinking about religious matters, theological education is often viewed as a hindrance to the true worship of God, since liberal scholarship in particular challenges evangelical faith. This skepticism often translates into a paralyzing anti-intellectualism, a phenomenon not unknown in black and white preaching circles. But even as such preachers despise the process of theological education—both its demanding intellectual regimen and its relentless criticism of received theological views—they cherish its value to their upward mobility and hunger after its symbolic rewards. This is why, perhaps, there are so many self-anointed, self-appointed, self-administered “doctors” in the Christian ministry, including the black pulpit (especially, perhaps, the black pulpit). The doctor deficiency among black clergy—the result of racist strictures against for
mal and higher education for most of our history—has led to its diseased exaggeration in such quarters. King certainly got major cachet from his degree.56 How many times would black folk derive pride from announcing that their leader was “Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.,” almost as if his title were part of his given name? And liberal white folk were pleased with themselves in pronouncing a title that King had collected from one of their schools. Calling him “Doctor King” was a way for them to participate vicariously in his achievement while perhaps unconsciously lauding themselves for having had the good sense to recognize his gifts. The anti-intellectualism of the clergy, the alienation of a white academic setting, the appeal of becoming a “doctor,” the desire to serve the black church, and a change in vocational aspiration in midstream might certainly have ganged up on a young black scholar who sought to relieve the intense pressure of being simultaneously vain, gifted, ambitious, and insecure. Neither can we gainsay King’s pride in being able to pull it all off—not simply the deception that the work he stole was his, which wasn’t difficult (after all, as his dissertation’s second reader, S. Paul Schilling commented, there were other student-scholars whose plagiarism was far worse than King’s)57—but the more difficult task of managing the competing demands of two worlds that, in the words of Bernice Johnson Reagon, King sought to “straddle.”58 In this sense, King’s plagiarism, though still tragic, was among the least of his worries. That is a profound commentary on the racist world King sought to penetrate, the conflicted black world from which he emerged, and the uncertain world into which he would be thrust as an educated agent of social change. Not to get the degree would be a greater failure than cheating to get it. The fault lies not simply with King, although he bears a lion’s share of the blame, but with a world that demanded that he and others perform under such conditions. The wonder is not that King cheated under these conditions, but that C. Eric Lincoln, Samuel Proctor, Evans Crawford, Cornish Rogers, Major Jones, and thousands of other blacks, did not.
Second, King’s plagiarism may have had to do with his aversion, one shared by many black students of his generation, to write a dissertation on race.59 Of course, that aversion is not the driving force in King’s cheating but its symptom. The racial climate that made race a scholarly taboo and encouraged the embrace of already validated European subject matter might have been the predicate for his plagiarism. The aversion to write about race was not accidental, but reflected the dilemma that all black students faced: if they wrote about race, they risked being pigeonholed or stereotyped; if they avoided it, they risked failing to develop critical resources to combat arguments about black inferiority. Even today, such a stigma persists, particularly in the light of the bitter culture wars still being fought. For instance, Eugene Genovese, in an otherwise tough and eminently fair review of King’s work, let slip that “King passed over the chance to take courses on social Christianity, Gandhi, race relations, and other trendy subjects, preferring courses on Plato, Hegel, formal logic, and modern philosophy.”60 If such courses were deemed trendy then, it is no wonder that rigorously exploring the ideas that pushed or prevented racial justice would be strongly discouraged in white academic settings. At Boston University, the stigma of “race scholar” was one that few students appeared willing to risk. As James Cone notes, King did “not even mention racism in most of his graduate papers that dealt with justice, love, sin, and evil.”61 Cone also argues that in “six years at Crozer and Boston, King never identified racism as a theological or philosophical problem or mentioned whether he recognized it in the student body and faculty.”62
Such issues were broached in the Dialectical Society, an organization of black graduate students founded by King and Cornish Rogers to offer their peers an intellectual forum to debate ideas relevant to black communities.63 The need for such a group underscores the schizophrenia that many black scholars faced, and often still do, in seeking to address the painful circumstances of black life while satisfying the demands of a white academy. Cone’s conclusion that King, like most other integrationists of his time, “appeared to be glad merely to have the opportunity to prove that Negroes could make it in the white man’s world,”64 is borne out by Rogers’s observation that “the only reason many students stuck around (and did everything that was required of them) was to get the degree which in the black community makes you equal to the man, to white folks, if you’ve got your degree from a white institution, the same degree that whites get.”65 In such an environment, King concluded that he would never set the world on fire with his scholarly gifts. And as he perhaps battled his own self-doubt in confronting the rigorous demands of scholarly work—work he couldn’t do as well as the work his genius had suited him for in the pulpit and the public stage, work of which he was not yet fully aware or capable—it is likely that cheating became a way to save face back home, satisfy “the man” at school, and sail off into the sunset of pastoral duties with no one having been the wiser about his grave sin. After all, as David Levering Lewis points out, no one, not even King himself, knew then that he would become Martin Luther King Jr.66 Neither did King or, for that matter, his admirers and detractors, realize that his failures, like his successes, would gain such wide attention.
Recent scholarship in the psychology of race may provide a small glimpse onto King’s tortured psychic landscape. This is by no means an attempt to excuse King’s misdeed. Neither is it an attempt to suggest that most of those blacks victimized by the problem I will discuss would ever resort to stealing others’ words as their own. Still, I think it opens a window onto King’s mental processes that might help us understand a bit better why he cheated. Studies by Stanford University psychologist Claude Steele and his colleagues suggest the existence of a problem that King most likely engaged.67 Steele and his colleagues have attempted to answer a difficult question: Why do able black college students fail to perform as well as their white colleagues? Throughout the 1990s, Steele says, “the national college-dropout rate for African-Americans has been 20 to 25 percent higher than that for whites. Among those who finish college, the grade-point average of black students is two thirds of a grade below that of whites.”68 Steele says that “the under-performance of black undergraduates is an unsettling problem” that may “alter or hamper career development, especially among blacks not attending the most selective schools.”69
Steele says the answers have resulted in an often “uncomfortably finger pointing . . . debate. Does the problem stem from something about black students themselves, such as poor motivation, a distracting peer culture, lack of family values, or—the unsettling suggestion of the The Bell Curve—genes?”70 Steele adds to that list a host of other factors relating to the “conditions of blacks’ lives: social economic deprivation, a society that views blacks through the lens of diminishing stereotypes and low expectation, too much coddling, or too much neglect?” What stumped researchers even more is that middle-class black students, who have had the social and economic resources to lift them above the social plight of their poorer peers, underperform as do disadvantaged blacks, garnering lower standardized-test scores, lower college grades, and lower graduation rates than their white peers. What forces could possibly account for such underperformance, even among middle-class black students? At the risk of oversimplifying and reducing Steele’s argument, it all boils down to what he and his colleagues termed “stereotype threat”: the “threat of being viewed through the lens of negative stereotype, or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype.”71
Steele develops his theory to apply to differential performance among black undergraduate students and their white peers. I apply it to King’s own possible mind-set and suggest that he cheated in part to escape or relieve “stereotype threat”—the enormous pressure of feeling under relentless white scrutiny and living with the fear of confirming stereotypes of black identity. In a telling passage, nineteen-year-old graduate student King (at an age when most young men are college sophomores) is des
cribed as being
terribly tense, unable to escape the fact that he was a Negro in a mostly white world. He was painfully aware of how whites stereotyped the Negro as lazy and messy, always laughing, always loud and late. He hated that image and tried desperately to avoid it. “If I were a minute late to class,” he said, “I was almost morbidly conscious of it and sure that everyone noticed it. Rather than be thought of as always laughing, I’m afraid I was grimly serious for a time. I had a tendency to overdress, to keep my room spotless, my shoes perfectly shined and my clothes immaculately pressed.”72
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