Martin Luther King Jr., Colorblindness, and Plagiarism

By Nicholas Stix

About two weeks ago, in an email I was later unable to find, An Old Friend asked parenthetically whether I knew if MLK Jr.’s passage promoting “colorblindness” in his August 23, 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech was plagiarized.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”

I have never heard of anyone claiming it was plagiarized. The passages from the speech that we know were plagiarized, were stolen from the Rev. Archibald Carey, from a speech the preacher had delivered at the 1952 Republican National Convention.

(The speech King delivered was written by Vincent Harding, or Stanley Levison, or Clarence B. Jones; every source seems to credit someone else.)

My hunch is that the speechwriter who inserted “I have a dream” got it from Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics to the Styne-Sondheim song in Gypsy, which was a hit, 1959 Broadway show nominated for eight Tonys, and a hit 1962 movie, that was also nominated for a slew of awards.

However, long after the speech was exposed as a plagiary, people fabricated racial fairy tales, turning Stephen Sondheim and the Rev. Archibald Carey’s words into King’s words, which he had supposedly extemporaneously summoned!

Regarding the colorblind passage, one would hope that if one were going to commit plagiarism, one would seek after better material. The passage is as clunky as they come. “The content of their character”?! There’s just character; there’s no content.

(I believe AOF mentioned this.)

The only explanation I can come up with for the clunkiness, was that the MLK speechwriter was using parallelism: Color of skin/content of character. However, he could just as well have used color/character.

(King’s greatness as an orator permitted him to transcend his material. However, when one reads the speech, one is dragged back down to Earth.)

I believe that the “colorblind” passage was written as a “pull quote” for MLK’s press allies. MLK didn’t for a second believe in colorblindness. As Steven Farron points out in his masterpiece of a book, The Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, the Importance of Character, and Other Lies, King had demanded racial spoils before the speech. Meanwhile, at the time of his 1968 murder, he was in Memphis demanding that all public sector jobs be distributed, based on hard racial quotas.

King was a race man, and a communist (he privately used the term “Marxist”).

That people cite the clunky passage so much is, I believe, solely due to King’s moral authority. He said the darnedest things, and people still cite him, as if they made sense.

The bases for his moral authority would be: •

His career as a serial plagiarist;
• The violence he did to Christian theology, which he did not at all believe in (e.g., he did not believe in the virgin birth);
• His commission of thousands of acts of adultery, many of them using his status as a Christian man of the cloth as cover, including “counseling” (as he and his black BU theology classmates put it, with a chuckle) pretty parishioners;
• His theft of tax-deductible donations, which he used for prostitutes and such;
• His support of violent crime;
• His opposition to America’s system of law, and to the police who enforced it;
• His treasonous support of our enemies in the War in Vietnam; and
• His rape.