Martin Luther King Jr. authorship issues

During the late 1980s, as the papers were being organized and catalogued, the staff of the project discovered that King's doctoral dissertation at Boston University, titled A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, included large sections from a dissertation written by another student (Jack Boozer) three years earlier at Boston University.

[1][2] As Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, has written, "instances of textual appropriation can be seen in his earliest extant writings as well as his dissertation.

"[3] Boston University, where King received his Ph.D. in systematic theology, conducted an investigation that found he appropriated[3] and plagiarized major portions of his doctoral thesis from various other authors who wrote about the topic.

The incident was then reported in U.S. in the November 9, 1990, edition of the Wall Street Journal, under the title of "To Their Dismay, King Scholars Find a Troubling Pattern".

[4] However, a letter is now attached to King's dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources.

25–26 of Volume II of The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., entitled "Rediscovering Precious Values, July 1951 – November 1955", Clayborne Carson, senior editor.

He commended King for his handling of a "difficult" topic "with broad learning, impressive ability and convincing mastery of the works immediately involved."

His professors at Boston University, like those at Crozer, saw King as an earnest and even gifted student who presented consistent, though evolving, theological identity in his essays, exams and classroom comments....

Although the extent of King's plagiaries suggest he knew that he was at least skirting academic norms, the extant documents offer no direct evidence in this matter.

"[14][15] In September 1962, SNCC activist Prathia Hall had spoken at a service commemorating Mount Olive Baptist Church in Terrell County, Georgia, which had been burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan.