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Plagiarist Obama plants embarrassing reminder of Martin Luther King's plagiarism in Oval Office

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This must be a black thing, plagiarism.

Or, rather, it would be embarrassing, if King’s plagiarism of 
his Ph.D thesis hadn’t been systematically covered up so that 
few know about it. In fact, King did not plagiarize the quote by 
Theodore Parker that was falsely attributed to him by Obama’s 
rug. But King’s word for word stealing of massive parts of his 
Ph.D thesis forever taints his reputation. What kind of person 
would do something like that?

On third thought, it is very embarrassing. As we see from the 
photo, the new carpet, with its outer border of pithy liberal 
statements, most of them by U.S. presidents, dominates the Oval 
Office. Now that the misattributed quotation has been 
discovered, what is Obama going to do? Have the carpet redone, 
with Martin Luther King’s name replaced by Theodore Parker’s? 
But that would spoil what is undoubtedly the carpet’s main 
appeal for Obama, that it memorializes King and puts him on the 
same level with several presidents. Or leave the carpet as is, 
with the false attribution intact, thus serving as a permanent 
reminder that the main hero of black and liberal/neocon America 
was a serious plagiarist?

The September 4 Washington Post reports:

Oval Office rug gets history wrong

By Jamie Stiehm [What a stupid name for an adult human being. Is 
this Jamie male, female, who knows?]

A mistake has been made in the Oval Office makeover that goes 
beyond the beige.

President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, 
with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, 
Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther 
King Jr. woven along its curved edge.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward 
justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama 
company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone 
Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic 
ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the 
Battle of Lexington.

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. 
Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you 
may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, 
Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the 
end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He 
died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.

A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an 
admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian’s lofty prophecy during 
marches and speeches. Often he’d ask in a refrain, “How long? 
Not long.” He would finish in a flourish: “Not long, because the 
arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

King made no secret of the author of this idea. As a Baptist 
preacher on the front lines of racial justice, he regarded 
Parker, a religious leader, as a kindred spirit.

Yet somehow a mistake was made and magnified in our culture to 
the point that a New England antebellum abolitionist’s words 
have been enshrined in the Oval Office while attributed to a 
major 20th-century figure. That is a shame, because the slain 
civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate was so 
eloquent in his own right. Obama, who is known for his 
rhetorical skills, is likely to feel the slight to King—and 
Parker.

My investigation into this error led me to David Remnick’s 
biography of Obama, “The Bridge,” published this year. Early in 
the narrative, Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, presents 
this as “Barack Obama’s favorite quotation.” It appears that 
neither Remnick nor Obama has traced the language to its true 
source.

Parker said in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral 
universe; the arc is a long one…. But from what I see I am sure 
it bends toward justice.”

The president is at minimum well-served by Parker’s presence in 
the room. Parker embodied the early 19th-century reformer’s 
passionate zeal for taking on several social causes at once. 
Many of these reformers were Unitarians or Quakers; some were 
Transcendentalists. Most courageously, as early as the 1830s, 
they opposed the laws on slavery and eventually harbored 
fugitives in the Underground Railroad network of safe houses. 
Without 30 years of a movement agitating and petitioning for 
slave emancipation, Lincoln could not have ended slavery with 
the stroke of a pen in the midst of war. Parker was in the 
vanguard that laid the social and intellectual groundwork.

The familiar quote from Lincoln woven into Obama’s rug is 
“government of the people, by the people and for the people,” 
the well-known utterance from the close of his Gettysburg 
Address in 1863.

Funny that in 1850, Parker wrote, “A democracy—that is a 
government of all the people, by all the people, for all the 
people.”

Theodore Parker, Oval Office wordmeister for the ages.

Jamie Stiehm, a journalist, is writing a book on the life of 
Lucretia Mott, a 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights 
leader. [I suppose we can assume that this Jamie is a female.]

- end of initial entry -
Keith J. writes from England:

Imagine if Jamie Stiehm had attributed the statement—“Government 
of the people, by the people and for the people”—not to Lincoln, 
not to Theodore Parker, but to its actual originator, at least 
in English, John Wycliffe (d. 1384 AD).

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017242.html
                   Ť

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Plagiarist Obama plants embarrassing reminder of Martin Luther King's plagiarism in Oval Office "Ronny Koch" <rkoch@banmlkday.com> - 2025-01-24 01:01 +0100

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