Critical Essay | Clayborne Carson, with Peter Holloran, Ralph E. Luker, and Penny Russell

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

What is the historical and biographical significance of the papers Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote as a divinity student at Crozer Theological Seminary and as a doctoral student at Boston University? Judged retroactively by the standards of academic scholarship, they are tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism. Moreover, even before the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project's discovery...
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