He was given a total pass, however. The Left said he did "so much good" that it is best to just ignore the "bad."
Affirmative action at its utmost.
(PSSST: other PhD's have had their degrees revoked for similar charges on a much smaller scale.)
King's fame lay in being a charismatic figure to bring these stolen sermons to the attention of the masses. There has to be some reason the original "I have a dream" mostly got the nation's yawns, but King's delivery inspired the nation. That said it sure would not have hurt him to tuck a credit or two into his addresses.
In his 1991 memoir, Breaking Barriers, journalist Carl Rowan writes that in 1964 congressman John Rooney told him that he and his congressional committee had heard J. Edgar Hoover play an audiotape of an apparent orgy held in King's Washington hotel suite. Over the sounds of a couple having intercourse in the background, according to Rooney, King could be heard saying to a man identified as Abernathy, "Come on over here, you big black motherf*cker, and let me suck your d*ck." Horrors, King was gay! (Rowan thinks this was just ribald repartee.) In his account of the same episode, civil rights historian Taylor Branch attributes a couple more quotes to King: "I'm f*cking for God!" and "I'm not a Negro tonight!" The FBI anonymously sent King (or, according to some accounts, King's wife, Coretta) a tape of compromising material recorded in his hotel rooms. The tape was either accompanied or followed up by a note suggesting that King should commit suicide if he wished to avoid exposure.
Did he plagiarize most of his writings? He plagiarized a lot of them. An investigation conducted by Boston University, where King got his Ph.D. in theology, determined that he had appropriated roughly a third of his doctoral thesis from a dissertation written three years earlier by another graduate student. Curiously, the same faculty member had been "first reader" of both theses, leading some to wonder whether King's faculty advisers at BU were incompetent or just guilty white liberals who gave a promising young black leader a pass. King also "borrowed" portions of many other writings and speeches, including the famous "I have a dream" speech he gave at the 1963 civil rights rally in Washington.
As every reasonable observer has commented, neither King's sexual wanderings nor his scholarly misdeeds detract from his core achievement. By continually publicizing black grievances while putting a palatable, nonviolent face on resistance to jim crow, King paved the way for the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s and a major turnaround in public attitudes about race. But there's no getting around the fact that he was a complex and deeply flawed man. Was he a great American? No argument here. Was he a fraud and a hypocrite? He was that, too.
--CECIL ADAMS