A Hero's Footnotes of Clay

By Richard N. Ostling

The historian's dream -- a major discovery about an important person -- is more of a nightmare for Stanford University professor Clayborne Carson. An admirer of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and an expert on black America, Carson was picked by King's widow Coretta to head the team that is compiling the civil rights leader's papers. Two years ago, Carson's staff came upon unsettling signs of plagiarism.

Carson ordered researchers to document any instances where King had lifted other persons' words and ideas without credit. They were extensive. The board of the King Papers Project, at a 1989 meeting attended by Coretta King, decided to reveal the facts in its first volumes of papers, due in 1992. But last week the Wall Street Journal broke the story.

The borrowings occurred from 1948 to '55, when the civil rights leader was an unknown student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., and a doctoral candidate at Boston University. According to Carson, King's writings regularly cribbed exact words or concepts from other people's work without proper attribution, although King usually cited the original source at least once. The prime example: King's doctoral dissertation in theology, which drew material from a dissertation written three years earlier by another student. By a "strict definition," in Carson's cautious phrase, this was plagiarism.

Why did King do it? Carson points out that King wrote his dissertation while he was a busy pastor at a large church in Montgomery. Thus he may have been rushed in his citations. David Garrow, author of the King biography Bearing the Cross, speculates that King may have been "profoundly insecure" at the time. Garrow also observes that preachers learn their craft by echoing one another, so perhaps King carried that practice into the classroom. Even so, "you can't excuse this," says Garrow.

That point was made emphatically last week by Boston University. When King was enrolled, the school declared, rules for citation were "strict, explicit and explicitly made known to all graduate students." The university has formed a blue-ribbon committee to investigate the alleged infraction. At worst, the school could strip King of his doctorate posthumously. But even though the revelations may tarnish King's reputation, they hardly diminish his - courageous and inspirational accomplishments in helping to achieve racial justice for millions of black Americans.

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke/Boston and Paul A. Witteman/San Francisco