King, Coretta Scott

Source:

 African American National Biography

King, Coretta Scott

(27 Apr. 1927–30 Jan. 2006),

was born in Heiberger, near Marion, Alabama, the second of three children of Obadiah Scott and Bernice McMurry, who farmed their own land. Although Coretta and her siblings worked in the garden and fields, hoeing and picking cotton, the Scotts were relatively well off. Her father was the first African American in the community to own a truck, which he used to transport pulpwood, and he also purchased his own sawmill, which was mysteriously burned to the ground a few days later. The family blamed the fire on whites jealous of their success.

Wanting a better life for their children, the Scotts sent all three to college. The eldest, Edythe, graduated at the top of her class at Marion's Lincoln High School in 1943 and earned a scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio; her brother, Obie, attended Central State University in nearby Wilberforce, Ohio. Coretta, who also graduated at the top of her high school class in 1945, won a scholarship to study elementary education and music at Antioch. She matriculated in 1945 and was one of only three African Americans in her class; the future jurist A. Leon Higginbotham was one of the others. Scott was active in extracurricular activities, especially in projects designed to improve race relations. She joined the college chapter of the NAACP and performed onstage at Antioch with Paul Robeson, the actor, singer, and activist, who encouraged her to pursue a musical career.

Although Antioch enjoyed a liberal reputation, Scott found that it was not immune to racial discrimination. When she applied to practice as a student teacher, the music department required that she do so at an all-black school system near the campus. The school district in which all other Antioch students did their practice work had no black teachers, and the college administration did not wish to upset the racial status quo in conservative southern Ohio by sending an African American student to teach there. Coretta Scott protested this Jim Crow policy to the office of the college president, but the president refused to support her request. She subsequently agreed to do her internship at the demonstration school on campus.

Scott studied piano and the violin, but focused on singing. She gave her first solo concert in 1948 and graduated with a BA from Antioch in Music Education three years later, in 1951. That year she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, on a full-tuition fellowship. With assistance from the Urban League, she found part-time work as a clerical assistant and also received out-of-state aid from Alabama, since her home state provided no opportunities for graduate study in music.

Moving to Boston changed the course of Coretta Scott's life in more ways than one, for in 1952 a friend there introduced her to Martin Luther King Jr., an ordained Baptist minister who was attending Boston University's School of Theology. Although she has said that she never wanted to be the wife of a pastor, Scott warmed to the theology student's sincere passion for social justice and also fell for his distinctive line of flattery. She later recalled that King “was a typical man. Smoothness. Jive. Some of it I had never heard of in my life. It was what I call intellectual jive” (Garrow, 45). King, for his part, admired Scott for standing up to his father, who wanted him to marry into one of Atlanta's leading black families. Scott bluntly told the imposing Daddy King that she, too, was from one of the finest families. Soon thereafter Martin Luther King Sr. accepted his son's choice and performed the couple's wedding ceremony in June 1953. Coretta Scott King asserted her independence, however, by excluding a promise to obey her husband in her wedding vows. In 1954, the year Coretta Scott King graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music, her husband accepted the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

The young couple could not have known that the direction of their lives again would be dramatically altered the following year. On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks, a local NAACP official, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery. Her arrest changed the course of southern history, for it united and mobilized Montgomery's black community under Martin Luther King's leadership in a mass boycott of the city's segregated bus system. The subsequent national and international press coverage made the young minister and his wife household names, but the limelight brought with it new dangers. During the bus boycott, angry whites made abusive and life-threatening telephone calls at all hours and shot at and bombed the King family home. In 1958 a mentally disturbed black woman attempted to assassinate Martin Luther King by stabbing him in a New York department store.

Like any other couple's, the Kings' married life was not untroubled. Money was a constant source of friction, since Martin paid little heed to financial matters and left his wife to deal with the day-to-day problems of looking after four children. Rumors of her husband's infidelities were also widespread during his lifetime, often encouraged by FBI mischief making. King has always claimed, however, that she and Martin “never had one single serious discussion about either of us being involved with another person” (Garrow, 374).

Under such trying circumstances Coretta King developed an iron will and a steely resolve to support her husband's commitment to civil rights. She also supported him by handling mail, telephone calls, and other administrative work, sometimes speaking at engagements that he was unable to attend and participating in musical programs to raise funds for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King's primary focus in the early years of the civil rights movement, however, was her family. She gave birth to four children: Yolande in 1955, Martin III in 1957, Dexter in 1961, and Bernice in 1963. There were occasions, however, when she resented her husband's full immersion in the civil rights movement. In 1963 she told a reporter that she regretted being absent from many of the era's most important civil rights demonstrations. “I'm usually at home,” she remarked, “because my husband says, ‘You have to take care of the children’” (Garrow, 308). Other women in the civil rights movement, notably Ella Baker, often remarked on the traditionalist—indeed, sexist—view of gender roles held by Martin Luther King and other prominent clergymen.

Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. and a major force in the civil rights movement in her own right, during an interview at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia, in January 1975. (AP Images.)

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Coretta King was less content to take a back seat when it came to matters of war and peace, as she had been a committed pacifist since her time at Antioch, where visiting speakers like Bayard Rustin had encouraged her nonviolent philosophy. King strongly influenced her husband's evolving opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1961 she attended a disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland, as a member of the group Women Strike for Peace. While her husband refrained from publicly challenging the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' foreign policy in the early 1960s, Coretta King attended several peace rallies and picketed the White House in 1965.

Tragically, Coretta Scott King would take center stage in the civil rights movement only after her husband's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968. Four days later she led a memorial march in Memphis, estimated at fifty thousand people. The international media spotlight continued to focus on the slain civil rights leader's family during King's funeral in Atlanta, which was attended by thousands of mourners and watched by millions on television. Coretta Scott King supported several SCLC projects in the wake of her husband's death. In the summer of 1968 she was one of the speakers at the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., and received national media attention when she, along with others in SCLC, led a protest march by striking hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1969.

In the 1970s Coretta King established and chaired the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. This project took her around the world in search of financial support, lecturing to audiences numbering in the hundreds. The King Center, which was dedicated on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta in 1981, contains more than 1 million documents related to the King family's civil rights activities. Several thousand scholars have used its library resources since it was established, but in the 1990s Coretta King and her family came under fire for the way she tightly controlled her husband's legacy, including his image and papers. She was also involved in a feud with the National Park Service over their handling of the King property on Auburn Avenue.

Coretta King's most enduring contribution to American culture has been as chair of the Martin L. King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission. In the late 1970s the King Center collected 6 million signatures on a petition urging the creation of a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial holiday, and in November 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed the bill designating the national holiday. The center also sponsors an annual celebratory memorial program on his birth date. King's involvement in the civil rights cause continued in the 1980s and 1990s. She was prominent in demonstrations against South Africa's apartheid system and has appeared at anniversary celebrations of her husband's most memorable speech at the 1963 March on Washington. In 1997 she supported a move granting a new trial for her husband's convicted assassin, James Earl Ray, but Ray died before a new trial was scheduled. Her most recent cause has been a project to build a memorial for her husband on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, of which he was a member, was also associated with this project.

After suffering a stroke and mild heart attack in August 2005, Coretta Scott King died on 30 January 2006 while being treated at the Hospital Santa Monica in Mexico City. Her funeral service was attended by 115,000 people, including President George W. Bush and the former presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. Other attendees included famous civil rights activists and writers, celebrities, and an assortment of politicians. The service took on a political edge (to George Bush and the first lady's obvious discomfort) with pointed reminders of King's advocacy of nonviolence and occasional references to the war in Iraq. The six-hour service was completed with a eulogy delivered by her daughter, Bernice (who was five when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968), who said: “Thank you, mother, for your incredible example of Christ-like love and obedience. We're going to miss you.” Throughout her lifetime, Coretta Scott King supported many progressive measures and received many awards and numerous honorary degrees. Perhaps the most prestigious and enduring was not given to her but rather is awarded in her name. The American Library Association's Coretta Scott King Award, established in the early 1970s, is given to highly distinguished African American writers and illustrators of children's literature.

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