Coretta Scott King

Civil rights activist

• Born: April 27, 1927
• Birthplace: Heiberger, near Marion, Alabama
• Died: January 31, 2006
• Place of death: Rosarito Beach, Mexico

King was the wife and widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Her efforts to carry on her husband’s political and philosophical legacy and her long commitment to global human rights have been equally instrumental in defining her public life.

Early Life

Coretta Scott King was born on April 27, 1927, in Heiberger, Alabama, the second of three children of Obadiah and Bernice McMurray Scott. Raised in a rural agrarian community, King and her siblings worked alongside their parents tilling and cultivating crops on the family farm. Although the Scotts were not wealthy, they enjoyed a reputation as an industrious and close-knit family whose social life revolved around Mount Tabor African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

King attended Lincoln High School, a private school for black students sponsored by the American Missionary Association. In 1945, she graduated as valedictorian of her class and received a scholarship to study music at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. While at Antioch, King majored in music and elementary education; however, academics did not define her entire collegiate experience. As an undergraduate, King observed racism in Yellow Springs and at Antioch. These events inspired her to become active in the student chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Race Relations Committee, and the Civil Liberties Committee. Thus began the nascent stages of King’s career as an activist.

After graduating from Antioch with a B.A. in 1951, King enrolled into Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, where she would later earn a degree in voice and violin. During her time in Boston, King met Martin Luther King, Jr., then an ordained minister and doctoral student at Boston University. They were married on June 18, 1953. By that fall, Martin was commissioned to assume the pastorship at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Their move to Montgomery would forever change the course of their lives and the burgeoning Civil Rights movement taking form in the American South.

In 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott launched the King family, especially Martin, into the national spotlight. As his civil rights program expanded, King devoted a significant amount of time to caring for their growing family. She balanced domestic responsibilities with providing moral and tangible support to Martin, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the movement at large. She marched in rallies, performed Freedom Concerts, and conducted fund-raisers on behalf of the SCLC. Before long, the Kings emerged as a powerful pair whose commitment to civil and human rights was unshakable. In 1964, King traveled to Oslo, Norway, with Martin, who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights advocacy.

Life’s Work

Martin’s assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, thrust King into widowhood and single parenthood of her four children, Yolanda, Martin III, Dexter, and Bernice. King was nearly thirty-one years old at the time. In a display of resilience and composure, the day before King’s funeral, King took her husband’s place and marched with striking sanitation workers in Memphis under the auspices of the fledgling Poor People’s Campaign. This event marked the beginning of her unwavering crusade to continue the work of nonviolent social protest and to preserve her husband’s legacy. In 1968, King conceptualized the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center, the first commemorative landscape dedicated to an African American leader.

During a brief sabbatical from her civil rights work, King wrote My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1969). In this memoir, she not only chronicled the life she shared with her husband but also outlined the philosophy of nonviolence as a tool for combating injustice. She elaborated on the ways in which the Kings’ public and private lives reflected such convictions. For King, nonviolence served as the organizing principle of her ministry of peace and social justice during and after the Civil Rights movement. Accordingly, she maintained a tireless schedule of international goodwill missions and participated in many peace rallies. She joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1959. In 1962, she served as a delegate for the Women’s Strike for Peace Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. She also traveled to Amsterdam in 1970 to perform a Freedom Concert and cofounded the National Committee for Full Employment in 1974.

During the 1980’s, King remained a visible force within the civil rights establishment. She was instrumental in leading the twentieth-anniversary March on Washington, and her stewardship of her husband’s legacy reached new heights. In particular, in 1986, after years of intense lobbying and an appointment as chairwoman of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Federal Holiday Commission, King helped inaugurate the legal holiday in honor of Martin’s birthday. In spite of the domestic triumphs in civil and human rights, King was ever mindful of the struggles for peace, freedom, and dignity that persisted globally. As such, she addressed international audiences in Germany and at the World Peace March on the issue of disarmament. King also was actively engaged in the anti-apartheid movement and was arrested at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., as a result of such protest.

After resigning from her longtime post as president of the King Memorial Center in 1990, King continued to play a leadership role and maintained a vibrant career as diplomat and activist. She cofacilitated the Soviet-American Women’s Summit and served as chairwoman of the Atlanta Committee to Host a Tribute to Nelson and Winnie Mandela in 1990. In a demonstration of support, in 1991 she attended the tenth anniversary of independence in Zimbabwe. In 1993, she published a revised edition of My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., in which she adapted her message of nonviolent social change to address a new generation of readers.

By the twenty-first century, King had expanded her political agenda to include a clearer stance in support of gay and lesbian rights. In 2004, despite the antigay sentiments of certain factions of the Civil Rights movement, King stated that gay marriage was a civil rights matter.

During King’s remarkable career, she received a plethora of honors and awards, including the Italian government’s Universal Love Award (1969) and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor (1986), among many others. She also was conferred more than one hundred honorary degrees from universities around the world, including Princeton and Harvard, for which she was the first woman to deliver the keynote commencement address.

After suffering a stroke and battling ovarian cancer, King died on January 31, 2006, in a holistic health center in Mexico. Her death prompted national and international memorial services and inspired droves of celebrities, dignitaries, and ordinary citizens to attend her funeral at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. King was buried next to her husband at the King Memorial Center.

Significance

King did not simply survive the loss of her husband. Instead, she turned personal tragedy into a platform to educate people worldwide about nonviolence and human rights. King’s long history of promoting peace and freedom, equality, and racial and economic justice, coupled with her efforts to preserve and honor Martin’s memory, helped cement her legacy as an indomitable force in the arena of global human and civil rights advocacy.

Bibliography

Crawford, Vicki. “In Memoriam: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for Civil and Human Rights: An Enduring Legacy.” The Journal of African American History 92, no. 1 (Winter, 2007): 106-117. A commemorative essay exploring the life and times of King and the ways in which scholars have begun to contextualize her legacy.

King, Coretta Scott. My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. Written a year after Martin’s assassination, this memoir is a deeply human account of King’s life with her husband and the movement to which he is perpetually bound. The appendix includes an address given by King on April 8, 1968, at Memphis City Hall, King’s funeral program, and the eulogy delivered by Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, among other important documents related to King’s life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. Rev. ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. A revised edition of her 1969 memoir, this book frames the message of nonviolence for a younger readership.

McCarty, Laura T. Coretta Scott King: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2009. Intended for student use, this accessibly written biography traces King’s life from her birth in 1927 to her death in 2006. It includes a useful timeline of events important to her life and the Civil Rights movement.