civil rights activist; writer; singer
Personal Information
Born Coretta Scott, April 27, 1927, in Marion, AL; died January 30, 2006; daughter of Obadiah and Bernice (McMurray) Scott; married Martin Luther King, Jr. (a Baptist minister and civil rights leader), June 18, 1953 (died April 4, 1968); children: Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, Bernice Albertine.
Education: Antioch College, A.B. 1951; New England Conservatory of Music, Mus.B. 1954.
Religion: Baptist.
Memberships: National Council of Negro Women, Women's Strike for Peace, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, NAACP, Martin Luther King, Jr., Foundation (president).
Career
Concert singer, activist, lecturer, author. Debuted as singer in Springfield, OH, 1948; delegate to White House Conference on Children and Youth, 1960; Women's Strike for Peace delegate to disarmament conference, Geneva, Switzerland, 1962; Morris Brown College, Atlanta, GA, voice instructor, 1962; Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc., Atlanta, founding president and chief executive officer, 1969--; Cable News Network, Atlanta, commentator, 1980--. Board member, Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Life's Work
On April 8, 1968, four days after her husband, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was brutally gunned down by assassin James Earl Ray on the balcony of a Memphis motel, Coretta Scott King flew to that city to take her husband's place at the head of the march for nonviolent social change. After the march, King rose and eloquently addressed the crowd, urging them to join with her in pursuing her husband's dream: "And those of you who believe in what Martin Luther King, Jr., stood for, I would challenge you today to see that his spirit never dies.... From this moment on we are going to go forward. We are going to continue his work to make all people truly free and to make every person feel that he is a human being."
Since that day King has herself emerged as one of the most charismatic and forceful civil rights leaders in the United States. She founded and serves as president of the $10 million Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta; she also gave hundreds of speeches everywhere from churches to college campuses, traveled the world over to meet with international, national, and local leaders to discuss race relations and human rights, written her autobiography, and edited a book of Dr. King's quotations.
Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, into an America where--simply because of the color of their skin--black people were often taught in impoverished, segregated schools, denied access to hotels and restaurants and hospitals, and beaten and imprisoned at the slightest real or imagined offense. Coretta was the second of three children born to Obadiah and Bernice Scott of Heiberger, Alabama, nine miles outside of Marion. The Scotts raised their children on a farm that had been in their family since the Civil War. Though it was rare for black people to own land in the South at that time, the Scotts were not affluent. They were especially hard hit economically during the Depression years of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Coretta herself hoed and picked cotton to earn money for the family. Obie Scott raised garden vegetables, hogs, cows, and chickens on the farm and drove a taxi to supplement the family income. When he invested his savings in a sawmill of his own, it mysteriously burned to the ground after just two weeks.
Disillusioned but undefeated, Mr. Scott then became the first black man in his community ever to own a truck. He hauled lumber, an occupation which brought him into direct competition with white men, who grew more and more threatened by him as the availability of jobs declined. He was frequently stopped on the highway and harassed at gunpoint. Nonetheless, he eventually opened a country store. Mr. Scott had a sixth-grade education, which was considerable for a black man of his generation, and according to her friend and biographer Octavia Vivian, Coretta wondered later how much he might have achieved if he had the opportunity to earn a high school diploma.
Coretta's mother, Bernice, was the person from whom Coretta inherited both her musical talent and her desire for an education. Though she had only a fourth-grade education herself, Mrs. Scott insisted that her daughters attend college even if each had only one dress to wear. Thanks to her dedication and to some scholarship assistance, the Scotts were able to send all three of their children to college at once. Coretta's older sister Edythe was the first full-time black student ever to live on the campus of Antioch College. (After two years there, however, Edythe transferred to Ohio State University, which had a more racially diverse student body.) Obie Leonard, Coretta's younger brother, became a minister after attending Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio, for two years.
An unusually sensitive and intelligent child, Coretta learned early on to recognize discrimination. Her first six years of education were spent at the Crossroads School, a one-room frame schoolhouse where just two teachers taught all six grades. Each day during the five-mile walk from their home to Crossroads, Coretta and her sister and brother were passed on the road by the school bus carrying the white children to their school in Marion.
This experience, among others, awakened in Coretta an awareness of racial injustices and a sense of mission to end discrimination. She firmly believed herself destined to some sort of work that would help to improve the condition of oppressed people, especially those "black and deprived" as she had been, she told Ebony.
For a long time King thought that she would make her contribution through music. After graduating from Crossroads at the top of her classes, King went on to Lincoln High School in Marion, a private missionary school where, for the first time, she encountered college-educated teachers, both black and white. At Lincoln she began to develop her musical talent. She played the trumpet and piano and sang in the chorus, appearing as a soloist in a number of school recitals and musicals. Her high school music teacher, Olive J. Williams, is credited with inspiring her to consider music as a career.
Because Lincoln was ten miles away, Coretta and the other black students from her area had to leave home early Monday morning and could not return until the weekend. Coretta's mother, displaying the same calm determination that has stood King herself in good stead throughout her public life, decided that the children should not have to be away from home for such long stretches of time. She secured a bus and every school day drove all of the children herself the ten miles each way to and from school--an unheard-of activity for a woman in those days.
In 1945, King graduated first in her high school class and enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She had been granted a partial scholarship by the college's Race Relations Committee. Though she was at first anxious about adjusting to the alien environment of the northern school and about competing with the white students, who, on the whole, were better prepared for higher education, she also realized the advantages of attending college in the North: northern schools were generally considered academically superior to those in the South. King decided to major in elementary education and in music.
While at Antioch, King participated in the college's challenging cooperative work-study program, in which students alternated a period of work with a period of study. As a work-study student she served the community in various roles, including that of nursery school attendant, camp counselor, and library assistant. Despite her earlier fears, she found most of her many opportunities at Antioch rewarding and challenging. She apparently did not encounter overt racial prejudice at the college until it came time for her to student teach.
Customarily, Antioch's education students were placed in the Yellow Springs, Ohio public school district to practice teach, but those schools had no black teachers at that time. The supervisor of the program asked King to agree either to travel nine miles away to an all-black school to teach or to teach at the Antioch Demonstration School. Frustrated, King decided to take a stand about her right to teach in the public schools, regardless of her race.
She took her complaint all the way to the president of the college, but to no avail. Even her fellow students refused to support her, fearing that to do so would cost all of them their practice-teaching positions and ultimately their degrees. Bitterly disappointed to discover the shallowness of Antioch's commitment to integration, King decided to accept the compromise position at the Antioch Demonstration School and strengthened her resolve to quietly but firmly resist racial injustices.
Meanwhile, King's interest in music was growing. She added violin to her repertoire of musical instruments and sang in the choir at the Second Baptist Church in Springfield, Ohio, where she gave her first solo concert in 1948. Concerts in Pennsylvania and Alabama followed, and she began to consider continuing her musical education after college. The chairman of the music department at Antioch encouraged her to apply to Boston's New England Conservatory of Music and to the Smith Noyes Foundation for fellowship support.
By the time she graduated in June of 1951, King had been accepted at the conservatory. She decided to give up her plans to become a teacher and to pursue a career on the concert stage. Although her tuition was fully covered by the fellowship, King still had to earn her room and board. She had already arranged to rent a room in the home of a wealthy Massachusetts family, contributors to a special interracial scholarship fund. When she arrived in Boston, she further arranged to clean the fifth floor of the house, which she shared with two other students, and two stairways, in exchange for her bed and breakfast. Without money for dinner, though, she was forced to survive on the foods she could afford, like crackers, peanut butter, and fruit. As biographer Vivian put it, King "was in the unique position of living at one of the wealthiest addresses in America and starving."
Later her financial situation began to improve. The Urban League found her a job as a file clerk at a mail-order firm, and after her first year, she began receiving out-of-state aid from her homestate of Alabama. This aid was provided for black students barred by segregation from attending white institutions in-state. King studied voice with retired opera star Marie Sundelius at the conservatory and also sang with the chorus and the Old South Choir.
While King was studying at the conservatory, another voice student introduced her to a young minister from Atlanta who was studying for a doctorate in theology at Boston University. Coretta Scott's first meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., went badly; he overwhelmed the rather reserved young woman by hinting at marriage on that very first date. Nonetheless, they continued to see each other. Coretta was impressed with King's drive and his concern for the underprivileged. His feelings seemed so similar to her own. But she wondered if--with his solidly middle-class background--he could ever really understand the poverty he hoped to help alleviate. Moreover, as he continued to press her about marriage, she was forced to wrestle with the thought of giving up her dream of becoming a concert singer.
In the end, King and Scott's many similarities won out over their differences. Both had been precocious children, voracious readers, and excellent students. Both had fathers whose willingness to stand up for justice for blacks in the South had impressed their children deeply. Scott and King were married on the lawn of Coretta's parents' home in Heiberger by the Reverend King, Sr., on June 18, 1953. After the wedding, the couple returned to Boston to complete their educations. King was then offered positions at two Northern churches, two Southern churches, and three schools. They chose to accept the pastorate of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and moved there in September of 1954.
On December 1, 1955, a black seamstress named Rosa Parks sat down in the first row reserved for black people at the back of a public bus in Montgomery. She had worked all day and was tired. When the bus pulled up to the Empire Theater stop, a crowd of white people boarded. Following the laws and customs of the segregated South, the bus driver stood up and asked the black people to move further toward the back of the bus. Three other people moved immediately, but Rosa Parks remained in her seat. When she refused once again to move, a policeman was summoned, and she was arrested for defying segregation laws. Martin Luther King, Jr., organized the Montgomery bus boycott in protest, and the civil rights movement was born. A year later, as a result of the phenomenally successful boycott, the Supreme Court declared Alabama's bus segregation laws unconstitutional.
The Kings' first child, Yolanda Denise, fondly nicknamed "Yoki" by her father, had been born just two weeks before the beginning of the boycott in 1955. The couple went on to have three more children. As Dr. King became more and more deeply involved in his nonviolent civil rights crusade, the burden of raising the children as well as a great deal of administrative work for the movement fell to Coretta. She handled the mail and phone calls from his office in their home, including the increasing number of threats on her husband's life.
Robert Johnson, in a 1991 article for Jet, recalled an anecdote once related by Martin Luther King about his wife: their phone had rung in the middle of the night. A sleepy Coretta picked it up to hear an angry voice on the other end of the line snarl: "I want to speak to that nigger who's running the bus boycott!" Calmly she replied, "My husband is asleep and does not wish to be disturbed. He told me to write the name and number of anyone who called to threaten his life so that he could return the call in the morning when he wakes up fresh." Indeed, King remained outwardly calm even when her husband was actually stabbed at a book signing in New York City by a black woman who was later institutionalized for mental incompetence. Splitting her time in the city between his hospital room and a temporary office that was set up for her there, King maintained the smooth operation of the civil rights movement.
King's grace under pressure did not desert her even when the family's home in Montgomery was bombed. She, a friend from church, and Yolanda, then an infant, were the only ones home at the time of the incident, and no one was hurt. But from that moment on, King was acutely aware of the constant danger they faced. The harassment, the jailings, the bombings, and the threats terrified all of them. King realized that she could never find a way to live with such terror; she could either turn her back on their life's work, or banish the fear. She claimed in her autobiography that from then on she lived without fear but held onto the knowledge that death could come to any one of them because of their work to end racial injustice.
During this time King also pursued a number of activities independent of her husband's work. Aside from fulfilling the speaking engagements that he could not keep, she taught voice in the music department of Morris Brown College in Atlanta, where they had moved in 1960, when Martin assumed the co-pastorate of the Ebenezer Baptist Church alongside his father. In addition, King was a Women's Strike for Peace delegate at the Disarmament Conference attended by representatives of seventeen nations and held in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1962. Moreover, she made use of her artistic talents by developing and performing in the Freedom Concert, which featured readings, music, and poetry narrating the history of the civil rights movement. Proceeds from the very successful program were contributed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, of which Dr. King was then head.
When Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April of 1968, his wife's commitment to civil rights faced its most severe trial yet. She was, however, better prepared for such a loss than most people would be, both because of her strong religious faith and because she had long ago confronted the dangers inherent in her husband's work. In the days and weeks that followed his death, she calmed the anger and despair of King followers and urged recommitment to the philosophy of nonviolence. She walked in his place at marches and spoke at civil rights and anti-Vietnam War rallies. Gradually she came to be seen as the worthy successor to Dr. King and a leader and symbol of the civil rights struggle.
In 1969 she announced plans for the creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in King's hometown of Atlanta. In the decades since the assassination, she has worked tirelessly to raise funds for the complex, which began in the basement of her home in Atlanta but now covers three full blocks near the Ebenezer Baptist Church. The center houses offices, Dr. King's elevated marble crypt surrounded by a 100-foot long reflecting pool, and the Freedom Hall meeting facility, containing a 3000-seat auditorium, conference rooms, a cultural center, and the King Library and Archives. One and a half million visitors stroll down the arch-covered Freedom Walk each year. The center has an annual budget of $3.2 million and employs more than 60 people. Its library serves five thousand scholars annually, who come to peruse the more than one million documents of the civil rights movement held there, including the personal papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. By 1995, King had stepped down as chairman and CEO of the King Center, passing the job to her youngest son, Dexter King.
The King Center also sponsors programs in voter education and registration, literacy, the performing arts, early childhood education, and internships for college students from around the world who come to learn effective means of nonviolent social protest. A Federal Bureau of Prisons Project, which is a conflict-resolution training program for prison personnel, a Single Parents Program providing job training, housing assistance, and counseling services, and a Black Family Project, which studies the crises facing black families and coordinates resources to alleviate them, are among the innovative programs the center offers.
In addition, the center launched the petition campaign in favor of making Dr. King's birthday a national holiday. The drive for a holiday began soon after his death and was led by a coalition of black leaders, legislators, and entertainers. Six million signatures were collected and presented to U.S. Congress. After a decade and a half of demonstrations, lobbying, letter-writing campaigns, speeches, and marches--including one attended by several hundred thousand people commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Dr. King's March on Washington--the holiday proponents finally won out. On November 2, 1983, under pressure from black politicians in his own party, then-President Ronald Reagan finally signed the bill designating the third Monday in January as the King Holiday, beginning in 1986.
In 1983, King coordinated the Coalition of Conscience, which sponsored the 20th Anniversary March on Washington. In 1985, she was arrested along with three of her children at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., in a protest against apartheid. In 1987, she was one of the leaders in the "Mobilization Against Fear and Intimidation" in Forsyth County, Ga. In 1988, she re-convened the Coalition of Conscience for the 25th Anniversary March on Washington. She was in the news again in 1997, calling for a new trial for her husband's convicted killer, James Earl Ray, who died the following year in prison without receiving a new trial. King was among those who believed that Ray was not the true killer, instead adhering to the conspiracy theory that a government intelligence agency committed the crime and used him as a patsy to cover it up.
As evidenced by her support for reform in South Africa, King has supported civil rights and freedom for people the world over. In March 2004, while speaking at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, King spoke out in support of the right of same-sex couples to marry. The issue had come to a head in the early months of 2004, with same-sex couples lining up outside courthouses across the country asking to be legally married in civil ceremonies. She called it a civil rights issue.
In the mid-to late-1990s, the King family drew sharp criticism for their handling of the center and King's legacy, at the core of which was a feud with the National Park Service over a proposed visitors center across the street from the King center. The King family planned to open an interactive museum and felt the Park Service plan would interfere. The two sides came to an agreement, and the Park Service opened their facility in 1996, but the King family did not go forward with their ideas. By 1999, the King family was again under fire for maintaining tight control over the Martin Luther King, Jr., image and his works, as well as for reaping generous profits off of the rights. But neither King nor her son would comment on any such controversy.
On January 30, 2006, King passed away in her sleep. She was 78 and had been in failing health since suffering a stroke and heart attack in August of 2005. King had appeared at a Martin Luther King Day dinner on Jan. 14, 2006, but did not speak.
King was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Dag Hammarskjold Award, 1969; the UAW Social Justice Award, 1980; and the Eugene V. Debs award, 1982. She was awarded more than 40 honorary degrees by academic institutions. She was the author of three books, and wrote a nationally syndicated column. She also served as the head of the delegation of the "Women for a Meaningful Summit" in Athens, Greece, and the "Soviet-American Women's Summit" in Washington, D.C., in anticipation of the Reagan-Gorbachov talks. Among the dozens of committees she founded or served on are Black Leadership Forum, the National Black Coalition for Voter Participation, and the Black Leadership Roundtable. In her honor, the American Library Association's Social Responsibilities Round Table each year recognizes distinguished contributions to children's literature by awarding its Coretta Scott King Award to deserving African-Americans.
Awards
National Council on Negro Women Annual Brotherhood Award, 1957; Louise Waterman Wise Award, 1963; Myrtle Wreath Award, Cleveland Hadassah, 1965; Wateler Peace Prize, 1968; Dag Hammerskjoeld Award, 1969; Pacem in Terris award, International Overseas Service Foundation, 1969; Premi Antonio Feltrinelli, 1969, for exceptional display of high moral valor; Leadership for Freedom Award, Roosevelt University, 1971; Martin Luther King Memorial Medal, College of the City of New York, 1971; Eugene V. Debs Award, 1982; Freedom Award, National Civil Rights Museum, 1991; Frontrunner Award, Sara Lee Corporation, 1996; humanitarian award, Martin Luther King Jr. State Holiday Commission, 1999; numerous honorary degrees.
Works
Selected writings
- (Editor) King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr., Newmarket Press, 1983.
- My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., Holt, 1969.
Further Reading
Books
- King, Coretta Scott, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., Holt, 1969.
- Vivian, Octavia, Coretta: The Story of Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fortress, 1970.
Periodicals- Ebony, January 1980; August 1982; January 1986; January 1987; January 1990; January 1991.
- Jet, February 5, 1981; September 19, 1983; November 7, 1983; November 21, 1983; July 15, 1985; January 20, 1986; May 8, 1989; January 21, 1991.
- New York Times, January 31, 2006.
- University of Rhode Island Pacer, September 2000. Available from http://advance.uri.edu/pacer/september2000/story2.htm.
Online- CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/31/obit.king/index.html (January 31, 2006).
- USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-03-24-king-marriage_x.htm (March 24, 2004).
— Susan M. Marren
