What specific passages in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dissertation were identified as plagiarized and from which sources did they originate?
Executive summary
A late-1980s archival review by the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project found that King's 1955 Boston University dissertation included "large sections" of text taken from other writers without appropriate quotation or specific citation, most notably material drawn from a 1952 dissertation by Boston University student Jack Boozer and from secondary sources King had used elsewhere in his student papers [1] [2] [3]. Boston University convened a faculty panel that concluded King had appropriated material from sources "not explicitly credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally and at some distance" and recommended a formal letter be attached to the library copy of the dissertation documenting the improprieties while leaving the degree in place [4] [5].
1. The discovery: which passages were called out and who flagged them
When Clayborne Carson’s King Papers Project began editing King’s papers, editors and researchers discovered that substantial stretches of King’s dissertation—especially the early chapters comparing the theologies of Paul Tillich and H. N. Wieman—contained wording and passages that matched prior scholarship and a BU dissertation by Jack Boozer; the initial public exposure of these parallels was reported in the press after Frank Johnson highlighted the matches in 1989 [1] [2] [6].
2. The Boozer connection: verbatim and near-verbatim lifts
Scholars working on the King Papers Project documented that King had used Boozer’s dissertation as a source and listed Boozer in the general bibliography, but had not attributed particular passages to Boozer or used quotation marks where Boozer’s language was reproduced closely—constituting the clearest instance of specific-source borrowing identified in the investigations [7] [3] [8].
3. Other specific borrowings: secondary sources and student papers
Beyond Boozer, the project’s editors found that other student essays and course papers by King contained "paragraphs lifted from the best secondary sources available to him," and that some of King’s topical student papers (for example, his essay on Mahayana Buddhism) were composed largely from secondary texts without adequate attribution; these patterns appear in the annotated papers published and summarized by the King Papers Project [6] [3].
4. What the Boston University panel actually said about the passages
Boston University’s four-member review panel described the issue not as isolated typographical errors but as "appropriating material from sources not explicitly credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally and at some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or verbatim quotation," and recommended that a statement of these findings be attached to the dissertation copy in the university library—stressing the presence of unmarked borrowings rather than reworking the degree itself [4] [5].
5. Quantification and contested totals: how much and who disputed it
Some commentators and later commentators have tried to quantify the scale—one secondary account cited in later commentary claimed high-percentage overlaps in portions of the dissertation—but the formal scholarly summaries published by the King Papers Project and the BU committee emphasized the qualitative pattern of unattributed borrowing rather than a single agreed numeric percentage; universities and defenders nonetheless argued that the dissertation still made "an intelligent contribution to scholarship" and Boston University left the doctorate intact while appending the committee’s finding [9] [5] [3].
6. Context, defenses, and interpretive frames
Defenders point to historical practices in preaching and to King's subsequent moral and political achievements, and scholars such as Keith Miller have argued that "voice merging" and the tradition of drawing on scripture and prior preachers complicate neat definitions of plagiarism in rhetorical or sermonic contexts; critics and some historians, however, treat the dissertation-level unattributed copying as a straightforward breach of academic standards, which is precisely what the BU panel recorded [6] [3] [10].
7. What remains beyond the available record
The assembled sources reliably identify Boozer’s dissertation and multiple secondary sources used in King’s student writings as the origins for the unattributed passages and confirm the BU panel’s language about "appropriating material," but detailed side‑by‑side lists of every sentence and its precise source are not reproduced in the summaries provided here; for exhaustive parallel quotations readers should consult the King Papers Project publications and the full BU panel report archived with the university [1] [4] [3].