ABSTRACT
The story of Martin Luther King’s plagiarism and the whitewash that followed is one of the appalling cases, and Theodore Pappas is that rare man willing to express the outrage that the entire nation should have felt. Pappas concludes that King may have started using the ideas and language of others without attribution as early as age fifteen. As an undergraduate at Morehouse College, he often lifted passages word-for-word without attribution. By the time he entered Crozer Theological Seminary in 1948, his papers were sometimes pieced together almost exclusively with stolen material. King’s most serious plagiarism is found in his 1955 Ph.D. thesis for Boston University. He lifted huge chunks from a dissertation on the same subject written by another B.U. student, Jack Boozer. Once again, Pappas sets out side-by-side passages that are often identical. King apparently stole from Boozer dozens of times. Pappas reports that one entire page of King’s thesis is lifted straight out of Boozer’s.
