Where was the “I have a dream” speech taken from?
The two persons I remember as detractors of Dr. King were quite repulsive persons.
One of these was an official of a local Mensa group. (I have been a Mensan since 1985.) This person was, and sounded and acted like, a typical Mississippi bigot; one MLK day I was at a Mensa function when this man started elucidating on Dr. King’s alleged sexual license, from which assdertion I inferred that the civil rights movement should not have happened. (This Mensan also told a woman friend of mine she could qualify for Mensa by granting sexual favors to someone who could recommend her. I’m suprised she didn’t kick him. He has since died.)
The other person was a veterinarian in Hermosa Beach, CA, in the late 60s. We took our dog to him for treatment; he had posted on his wall a faked photo of Dr. King at some Communist function or other, as if to imply that King and the civil rights movement were part of Communist conspiracy. The man also apparently unbuttoned the blouse (down the back) of a young woman, who had come in with her mother, to get treatment for their dog; and this vet also allowed his own wife, not a DVM, to treat animals.
So I guess there are people, like Dr. King, whom you can admire simply for the enemies they have made.
Yeah, that’s a BIG issue here. I’ve read most of these charges against King before, and dismissed them because I can’t trust the sources. I’m doing a little googling for info now (I did “MLK plagiarism”). Some stuff is worthwhile, other stuff is garbage, reiterating the Communist charge that Cecil debunks, for example. I say it can still be worthwhile if you weed out the racist and otherwise stupid junk and just find actual info, like relevant and excerpted speeches.
chem-gharbison.unl.edu/mlk/whose_dream.html
Over here, for example, is something worthwhile - it just shows a famous passage from the “I Have a Dream” speech next to something written by Archibald Carey, who is identified as a correspondent of King’s, some 11 years earlier that is very similar. Is there a way to pass on requests for info to Cecil or the staff?
King held an orgy for a Congressional Committee?
Watch those prepositional phrases, Cecil. You’re being published, clearness & accuracy are important. I assume you meant this:
“In his 1991 memoir, Breaking Barriers, journalist Carl Rowan writes that in 1964 congressman John Rooney told him that he was present when J. Edgar Hoover played, for a congressional committee, an audiotape of an apparent orgy held in King’s Washington hotel suite.”
or even this would work:
“In his 1991 memoir, Breaking Barriers, journalist Carl Rowan writes that in 1964 congressman John Rooney told him that he was present when J. Edgar Hoover played an audiotapeof an apparent orgy held in King’s Washington hotel suitefor a congressional committee.”
Parenthetical punctuation is your friend, Cece.
It is a commonplace observation that the greatest people often have the greatest flaws. Saints are rare, and a saint who accomplishes great things is even rarer.
Thurgood Marshall gave J. Edgar Hoover the names of suspected communists in the NAACP. Marshall was a jealous man who resented the attention accorded to Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders.
Henry Ford was an anti-semite.
Gandhi held some pretty peculiar views, and once suggested that the Jews under the Nazis should commit mass suicide. He was so against eating meat that he counseled a sick relative that it was preferable to die rather than eat the meat prescribed by a doctor.
None of these facts diminishes the accomplishments of these people. Anyone who thinks that character flaws such as hypocrisy or philandering disqualify a person from being a hero will have no heros. I prefer to think of Martin Luther King, Jr. as someone with deep character flaws who, nonetheless, used his talent and courage at a critical point in history to make his country and the world a better place.
Jeff Lichtman-exactly.
Quite a few of the Founding Fathers were slave owners and some were womanizers. (Ben Franklin especially!)
FDR was womanizer. Winston Churchill was a drunk. And don’t EVEN mention Oscar Schindler!
No one is perfect.
We can say yeah, King was a jerk in some aspects-a lot of people are. But so what? What he did do that was RIGHT, was outstanding.
BTW, does Coretta King ever speak about this? (I feel bad for her!) She’s also a pretty outstanding human rights activist.
I still don’t think the phrase “fraud and hypocrite” is right. If you came up to me at work and said “MLK was a fraud and hypocrite”, I would assume you mean something about his stances, not sex life or cheating on his dissertation.
The real issue on the dissertation might also be, how many other students did the same those years at that school? I’m not defending it, but the use of fake papers in grad school and the rare reading of them by faculty at 2nd and 3rd rate schools is well known.
The idea is that some of his actions were in contrast to his public stances, that’s what makes for hypocrisy. It doesn’t falsify his ideas, i.e. freedom and equality for all. It means he didn’t live up to some of them.
I’ve got to reject that argument. At my school, if you get caught plagiarizing or cheating, you get expelled and that’s the end of it. If everybody did it, it wouldn’t be OK. As stated by Slow Mind Thinking, someone caught doing this on his thesis would lose the doctorate.
I can’t imagine a large percentage of students copied so much of their doctoral theses. And if they did, that says that BU has, or had, an unbelievably bad doctoral divinity program, which would cast a shadow over King’s degree anyway, not excuse his actions.
Is BU a second- or third-rate school? These days it’s considered quite good. And again, we’re dealing with this one program, not the whole school per se.
Interestingly, one site I visited while looking into this says that MLK actually took a course at BU about plariarism. Then he went and plagiarized a third of his thesis. Oy.
drhess, plagiarism is a serious offense, especially in college. If caught, one can be expelled.
No one is saying that Dr. King was a complete demon. What we ARE saying is that he was-surprise, surprise!-a human being, just like the rest of us.
Ah, it is probably a symptom of the decadence of our times that when I read that King held an orgy for a congressional committee, I took that absolutely at face value. He was an important guy with stuff to accomplish . . . of course it would be absolutely necessary to host an orgy for other important types. Get them around to your way of thinking and all, plus the potential blackmail material.
Quite. However, the question of appropriate phrasing should perhaps not be dismissed out of hand. “A fraud and a hypocrite,” as a label, can be used to bludgeon King’s legacy of civil rights accomplishments, in an attempt to argue that the goals and achievements of the civil rights movement were not good things in and of themselves.
The statement, “Martin Luther King, Jr. was guilty of fraud and hypocrisy” conveys the truth of the charges under discussion with perfectly acceptable accuracy, without reducing Dr. King’s essence to that of irredeemable reprobate. Nor does it give ammunition to those who would wish to do so.
It’s not really that surprising that King might borrow portions of his speeches from other speeches. He thought of himself first of all as a preacher. Borrowing lines and ideas from other preachers’ sermons is pretty common. The idea in a sermon isn’t to convey a new idea. It’s to express an old idea in an interesting fashion.
Complaining that King’s speeches weren’t very original also misses the point. As a civil rights leader, he again thought of himself as a preacher. He wasn’t trying to convey new ideas to the audience. He was trying to remind them of old ideas that they had forgotten. King wasn’t a brilliantly original thinker, and he didn’t think of himself as one. He was a great orator and tactical leader, but he wasn’t expressing new ideas.
The problem is that this doesn’t fit with the techniques of original research that you’re supposed to learn in grad school. He knew what plagarism is, and he should have avoided it. His faculty advisor should have recognized plagarism in his thesis. He should have handed the thesis back to King and said, “This isn’t acceptable. You’ve got to completely rewrite this.”
It’s not really that surprising that King might borrow portions of his speeches from other speeches. He thought of himself first of all as a preacher. Borrowing lines and ideas from other preachers’ sermons is pretty common. The idea in a sermon isn’t to convey a new idea. It’s to express an old idea in an interesting fashion.
Complaining that King’s speeches weren’t very original also misses the point. As a civil rights leader, he again thought of himself as a preacher. He wasn’t trying to convey new ideas to the audience. He was trying to remind them of old ideas that they had forgotten. King wasn’t a brilliantly original thinker, and he didn’t think of himself as one. He was a great orator and tactical leader, but he wasn’t expressing new ideas.
The problem is that this doesn’t fit with the techniques of original research that you’re supposed to learn in grad school. He knew what plagarism is, and he should have avoided it. His faculty advisor should have recognized plagarism in his thesis. He should have handed the thesis back to King and said, “This isn’t acceptable. You’ve got to completely rewrite this.”
And now you’re going to say, “Boy, what a hypocrite that Wendell Wagner is! He stole an entire post word for word from himself!”
I’m not really all that concerned about King’s woman-chasing and plagiarism. They were character flaws, but they weren’t really what I find important about him. In the things that mattered, leading the charge for civil rights, he did a great job. If he had been a lousy leader who screwed up the civil rights campaign, it wouldn’t matter that he was also faithful to his wife and didn’t plagiarize. He would still be a mediocre nonentity. There are LOTS of mediocre nonentities who don’t plagiarize and are faithful to their wives.
And to be honest, I know whos’ gonna be very happy about and interested in King’s character flaws, and it ain’t gonna be sexual moralists or intellectual property rights defenders. It’s gonna be the same crew of racists and bigots who hate the whole civil rights movement.
While I have to acknowledge King’s character flaws to be fair, I’m gonna be extremely suspicious of anyone who seems TOO interested in harping on his flaws. I’ll keep an open mind, but my brains will remain in place.
[ Slight hijack ]:
Is it plagiarism to include the phrases or expressions of others in a speech (where, one presumes, there will be no footnotes and where interrupting the flow with frequent repetitions of “and as ___ has said” can mar the delivery)?
I am not talking about the dissertations. I am specifically talking about including borrowed phrases in speeches. (After all, I remember lots of wall posters with the quotation
attributed to Robert F. Kennedy, so it seems that he included it in some speech of his, at some point. (I also recall my Dad discussing this quote and opining that RFK probably assumed the audience would be literate enough to know the source.)
Is there an established protocol for when a speech must indicate all its sources?
[ /hijack ]
I doubt it. Perhaps there might be one if the speech is published. Although in this case, we don’t seem to just be talking about allusions and turns of phrase.
Maybe you should ask Joe Biden whether it’s wrong to plagiarize other people’s words in a speech, Tom. 
The Atlantic had an article last year about King’s supposed Communist ties.
Did anyone else think that the orgy allegations smacked of urban legend status?
I mean, Hoover plays a tape which Rooney hears, who then tells Rowan, who tells us. Does anyone have any suspicions that perhaps there are several middlemen that have been excluded, a la most urban legends?
I’m not saying that King was necessarily a choir boy, just that I find 3rd hand reports of a tape a bit short of credible.