I have been reading a 2026 book by David Epstein titled Inside
the Box: How constraints make us better. At Google Books there is a preview up to
page 23. He describes a different viewpoint about plagiarism in
preaching. Chapter 6 is titled The Remix of Everything. Selected from pages 87
to 93, he says:
“Keith Miller was working on his English PhD at Texas
Christian University in 1983, analyzing the rhetorical techniques in Martin
Luther King Jr.’s sermons, when a friend alerted him to something strange.
The friend was studying at Vanderbilt University’s seminary,
and had come across a 1968 King sermon –‘The Drum Major Instinct’ – that had a
lot in common with a 1952 sermon (‘Drum Major Instincts’) by the prominent
preacher J. Wallace Hamilton. Both use similar language to describe the human
instinct to want to lead the parade and be recognized.
Miller assumed this was a one-off instance, until one day
when he was perusing books in his father’s office. Rev. Ernest Miller was the
head of a congregation in McAllen Texas, right along the border of Mexico, and
he had a large library. Keith Miller was flipping through a text of old sermons
when he landed on another with the same exact title as a sermon that King delivered
later. It also used the same opening anecdote. Maybe ‘The Drum Major Instinct’
wasn’t an isolated instance after all.
Miller asked his father to list notable preachers. He took
the list to the TCU seminary library and combed books of their sermons. Then he
went to Atlanta to interview Martin Luther King Sr. and King’s mentor, Benjamin
Mays, a minister and the former president of Morehouse College, from which King
graduated at nineteen.
The more sermons Miller read, the more he realized he was
rereading. He found shared titles, structures, anecdotes, and turns of phrase
between King’s sermons and those of other preachers. Almost every sermon and
essay of King’s he could find – even his Nobel Prize lecture – contained at
least some historical antecedent. Sometimes it was the order of specific
points, or common literary reference, or exact descriptions of a Biblical
lesson. Sometimes it was all of the above. Take, for example, the sermon ‘What
Is Man?’
….The more Miller read, the more tangled the web of
influence and borrowing appeared to be. But he also found that King wasn’t
unique; he was representative. Had Miller been a noir-film detective, his
cork-board of evidence would have been completely obscured by red string
connecting preachers and their sermons. King’s version was just the latest
iteration in a deep ‘What Is Man?’ lineage.
….Keith Miller ended up writing not only a dissertation but
a full book exhaustively tracing the source material of King’s sermons and
essays; Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and
Its Sources. Miller explained that King grew up in the folk-preaching
tradition – beginning with watching his father – in which borrowing words was
not only encouraged but expected, and language was not thought of as
proprietary.
Excessive originality, in fact, was seen as self-centered,
if not downright suspicious. The idea of ‘preaching to the choir’ – an expression
that connotes a redundant message – was a good thing. Listeners expected the
reinforcement and recharging of lessons with authority and familiarity, not
originality. Sermons were treated like songs, shared and adapted readily for an
audience that expected to hear a version of the hits. ‘My father went to
seminary at the same time King did,’ Miller told me, ‘and he actually borrowed
from some of the same books of sermons.’
The importance of borrowing has often been missed in King
scholarship. Entire books have been written on the 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech
and not even mentioning that the famously off-script crescendo (repeating ‘let
freedom ring from . . .’) was adapted from the conclusion of an address given
by King’s friend Archibald Carey Jr. in 1952, which itself echoed the
conclusion of a speech by investigative journalist and activist Ida B. Wells in
1893. (‘I’d used in many times before,’ King said later).
Borrowing was so common that mid-twentieth century preachers
would occasionally pester one another to publish their sermons so that they
could be riffed upon, like jazz standards. One distinguished New York City
minister repeatedly welcomed King to his pulpit, after King reworked and
published a version of that preacher’s own sermon. Another pastor was an editor at a magazine
that published a King homily based on that pastor’s own work. Preachers
regularly accepted this from one another for a good reason: It worked. Acquaintances
borrowed from each other, and from popular orators like Fosdick and Hamilton,
who published their sermons and preached to millions over the radio. King
purposely chose widely used material. It provided Virginia Woolf’s ‘rope’ that
must be thrown to the audience if they are to coma along with something new.”
….When King graduated from Morehouse and entered Crozer Theological
Seminary, he was surrounded by white people for the first time. His tactic for
satisfying professors fit squarely within the folk-preaching tradition: He
wrote papers that remixed and repeated back the professors’ own beliefs. He
graduated at the top of his class, and received a fellowship and an award given
by the faculty to the most outstanding student.
After Crozer, King continued to refine his practice of
borrowing, remixing, and building on work that he knew his audience already
accepted. He did it both in environments where it was acceptable – preaching from
the pulpit – and in others where it was decidedly not. Near the top of his 1955
PhD dissertation at Boston University, King highlighted one of his sources: ‘In
1952 a very fine dissertation was done in this school by Jack Boozer.’ That
dissertation had been presented to the very same thesis adviser. As ever, King
was building on material he knew his target audience had already approved. But.
As he did with sermons, King copied some passages directly from Boozer. In the
late 1980s researchers at Stanford University’s Kings Papers Project discovered
the dissertation plagiarism. Soon it exploded in national headlines, and a
Boston University committee was convened to determine whether to revoke King’s
doctorate. Ultimately, the committee decided not to strip the degree, because
King was not alive to defend himself and because the dissertation still made ‘an
intelligent contribution to scholarship.’ Academic papers prize strict
originality – to such a degree that they almost never connect with any audience
at all. That was no use to King, and he regularly violated the norms of
scholarly writing by doing what he had learned in the gospel tradition.”
There is an article by Josh Howerton on September 9, 2022 titled
On “Sermon Plagiarism” Accusations. And rather ironically, another article by Theodore
Pappas in Chronicles magazine for May 1998 titled The Life and Times
of the King Plagiarism Story discusses how King’s estate charges licensing fees
for using ‘his’ content. Also, there is a Wikipedia page titled Martin Luther
King Jr. authorship issues.
The image of Dr. King came from Wikimedia Commons.
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