"King had to be moderate enough to appeal to these white people, yet radical enough to get some substantial change," says Miller. "It's a damned difficult dilemma."
The difference between King and the civil rights leaders who preceded him was King's language. "I think it's the most important thing about him," says Miller. That King's masterful use of the Bible's idealistic and visionary language was filtered through various interpreters who preceded him to the pulpit is the soul of Voice of Deliverance. @rule:
@body:Among the well-known King speeches Miller analyzes in the book are "Drum Major Instinct," delivered two months before his death in 1968 and replayed during his funeral at Ebenezer Church in Atlanta; "Letter From Birmingham Jail," a sermon delivered at the height of his nonviolent battle against Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor; "I Have Been to the Mountaintop," the speech given to striking Memphis garbage men a day before his murder; and "I Have a Dream," which King delivered at the foot of the Lincoln Monument in 1963. All contain borrowings from unacknowledged sources. As Miller points out, the "voice-merging" technique King brought to his public speaking was a tool learned in the church of his father and grandfather, both preachers. "I Have a Dream" is an example of the technique. King constructed the speech, delivered to more than 100,000 civil rights marchers in Washington, D.C., by melding into one transcendent message bits of Biblical imagery, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. The speech, generally considered among the century's best, concludes with King quoting an "old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we're free at last!"
En route to the speech's rousing climax, though, King recites the lyrics to "America the Beautiful." "From every mountainside," the song says, "let freedom ring."
"So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire," King continues, seemingly in his own words. "Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
"Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania . . . .
"Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
"Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. "Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill in Mississippi.
"From every mountainside, let freedom ring." But this section of the classic folk sermon carries startling echoes of a speech delivered more than a decade earlier by black pastor Archibald Carey. In an address to the 1952 Republican National Convention, Carey, whom King would later meet, concluded by reciting the lyrics to "America the Beautiful." Then: "That's exactly what we mean--from every mountainside, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia--let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States, but for . . . the disinherited of all the Earth--may the Republican party, under God, from every mountainside, LET FREEDOM RING!"
"It's going to take time for people to assimilate this whole business of his sources," says Miller. "The word 'plagiarism--the root of the word--means stealing and/or kidnaping. Stealing means taking something that doesn't belong to you that somebody else doesn't want you to have. That connotation is so powerfully negative that I don't think it's appropriate in this context. "These preachers all borrowed from each other, black, white, liberal, conservative, famous and ordinary. Ordinary preachers tend to borrow more often than famous. "The other preachers approved of what he was doing. They had reason to know about it. At least one or two of them did know about it, and they kept inviting him to their churches. They were glad!"
@rule:
@body:The study of King's public language continues. The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, based at Stanford University, is gradually studying and publishing all of King's words. Some of the project's findings, like those first made public by the Wall Street Journal in 1990, have been--and will continue to be--disturbing to anyone who appreciates King or his legacy.
King was a plagiarist. His writing is full of uncredited language.
Keith Miller has now contributed to the debate by exposing and explaining King's use of borrowed material in his speeches and sermons. King's most devout followers are tempted to hold Miller responsible for exposing King's spoken-word "borrowings." Conversely, academics have criticized Miller for so meticulously placing the "borrowings" in their proper context; they interpret Miller's explanation as justification. After "eight years and nine months" researching Martin Luther King, Miller doesn't shy away from the charge. Miller, who likely will pick baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson as the topic of his next book, doesn't quite dismiss King's academic plagiarisms. King's scholarly writing was virtually meaningless weighed beside his later accomplishments, Miller says. And Miller is convinced that whatever technical, ivory-tower sins the preacher might have committed in assembling his school papers and later sermons and speeches, they are far outweighed by the profound changes King inspired in society. "There's this damned fascination with this plagiarism stuff," says Miller, who is teaching a class titled "Critical Reading and Writing About Literature" this semester. "What you do in school in not ultimately important, anyway. What matters is what you do with your life. "I think he should have used sources properly. I think that's a flaw, and I think he shouldn't have done that. But I don't see what it has to do with the civil rights movement. "It has nothing to do with 'I Have a Dream."
IN CHINA, NO RIGHTS TO LIFE... v9-23-92
