Coretta Scott King

• 1. Introduction

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  In October 1960, Coretta Scott King telephoned her friend Harris Wofford and wept. "They're going to kill him. I know they are going to kill him." Her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., had been sent back to jail for four months of hard labor. She was expecting a baby.

  Wofford passed her fear to Sargent Shriver in Chicago. Shriver waited for a private moment with presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and suggested that he call. Kennedy did, and told her he was thinking about her and Dr. King. Reporters learned of the call quickly. Historians have credited it with mobilizing African-American voters in that election.

  Martin Luther King Sr. was so grateful that he declared, "I'll take a Catholic or the devil himself if he'll wipe the tears from my daughter-in-law's eyes."

  That one call hides a larger story. She was a trained singer from rural Alabama who gave up her musical ambitions for a cause. Then she kept fighting for almost four decades after her husband was gone. Admirers came to call her the First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement.

  How did a girl who picked cotton become someone presidents telephoned? What did she give up along the way? And what did she build, defend and fight for once the movement's most famous voice was silenced?

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• 2. Cotton, Chorus, and Antioch

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  Coretta Scott was born in her parents' home in Heiberger, Alabama, and her great-grandmother Delia Scott, a former slave, served as midwife. She was the third of four children of Obadiah and Bernice McMurry Scott. Her father had been a policeman before he started his own businesses, including a clothing shop and a general store. He also owned a lumber mill. White neighbors burned it down after he refused to sell it to a white logger.

  Bernice Scott had left school after the fourth grade. Even so, she drove a school bus, played piano at church and helped in her husband's business. She also had firm plans for her children. Coretta later recalled her saying, "My children are going to college, even if it means I only have but one dress to put on."

  Another influence was her maternal grandfather, Martin van Buren McMurry. He was a self-taught reader with little schooling who eventually owned a 280-acre farm. His mixed ancestry meant he looked white, yet he held the idea of passing in contempt. He is credited with inspiring Coretta's passion for education.

  During the Great Depression, the Scott children picked cotton and shared a bedroom with their parents. At age 10, Coretta was already working to add to the family's income. She described herself as a tomboy who could climb trees and wrestle boys. Her brother Obadiah thought she always "tried to excel in everything she did."

  Because of segregation, the closest high school open to black students was Lincoln Normal School in Marion, nine miles from home. Bernice drove the bus that carried the local black teenagers there. By the time Coretta arrived, tuition had been suspended and the school charged four dollars and fifty cents a year. She became the leading soprano of the senior chorus, played trumpet and piano, and directed a choir at her home church. She graduated as valedictorian in 1945.

  Her older sister Edythe was already at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. A program there offered full scholarships to non-white students in an attempt to diversify the historically white campus. Coretta said Antioch saw itself as a "laboratory in democracy" yet had no black students. Edythe became the first African American to attend on a fully integrated basis. Coretta said everyone who followed her owed Edythe a great debt of gratitude.

  At Antioch, Coretta studied music with Walter Anderson, the first non-white chair of an academic department at a historically white college. She joined the campus chapter of the NAACP and its Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees. Her activism sharpened when the local school board refused to let her do her required practice teaching in the Yellow Springs public schools. The college administration could not or would not change that, so it placed her at its own laboratory school instead. In these years she also babysat for the Lithgow family, including the future actor John Lithgow.

  Then she won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and left Antioch to take it.

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• 3. A Suitor in Boston

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  At the New England Conservatory, Coretta studied voice with Marie Sundelius. A mutual friend, Mary Powell, was asked by a young aspiring minister named Martin Luther King Jr. about the girls on campus. Powell named two, and King was unimpressed by the other. That left Coretta as the only one remaining.

  Coretta showed little interest at first, even after Powell told her he had a promising future. She finally agreed to meet him. When they met in person, she was surprised by how short he was.

  King soon told her she had every quality he wanted in a wife. Coretta brushed this aside. "I don't see how you can say that. You don't even know me." He asked to see her again anyway. Two weeks after they met, he wrote to his mother that he had met his wife. Their dates were mostly political and racial discussions.

  Coretta still pictured a career in music, and she knew marriage to King would end it. Her sister Edythe asked what made him so appealing. Coretta answered, "I suppose it's because Martin reminds me so much of our father."

  In August 1952, she met his parents, Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. That fall the elder Kings visited their son and grew suspicious, partly because of how clean his apartment was. Martin Sr. told her a music career did not suit a Baptist minister's wife. He asked if she took his son seriously, and said many other women were interested in him. She replied that she had "a lot to offer" too. The elder Kings then tracked down Edythe and shared a lunch with her. Edythe insisted her sister was an excellent choice and did not need to bargain for a husband.

  On Valentine's Day 1953, the couple announced their engagement in the Atlanta Daily World. With a June wedding only four months away, Coretta wrote to Edythe about her doubts. Martin Sr. resented that his son had chosen her over someone from Alabama. He accused his son of neglecting his studies. The standoff ended when Martin declared that he would earn a doctorate and marry her afterward. His father gave his blessing.

  Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr. were married on the 18th of June 1953, on the lawn of her mother's house. His father performed the ceremony. After finishing her degree in voice and piano, she moved with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama. She had asked for one change to the service. The vow to obey her husband was removed, which was unusual for the time.

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• 4. Montgomery Under Fire

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  The 1st of September 1954 was the day Martin became full-time pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The couple moved into the church parsonage on South Jackson Street. Coretta joined the choir, taught Sunday school and took part in the Baptist Training Union and Missionary Society. On the 6th of March 1955, she gave her first concert at First Baptist Church. According to E. P. Wallace, she captivated the audience. Her devotion to the cause, at the cost of her own musical ambitions, would come to stand for the sacrifices of many African-American women in the movement.

  Their first child, Yolanda, was born on the 17th of November 1955, and Coretta insisted on the name. Soon the Montgomery bus boycott put her husband at its head. In January 1956, she answered numerous phone calls threatening his life. Rumors spread, meant to turn African Americans against him, that he had bought her a Buick station wagon.

  On the 30th of January 1956, Coretta and Mary Lucy Williams, the wife of a Dexter congregation member, heard what sounded like a brick striking the concrete porch. Coretta urged them to leave the front room. An explosion then rocked the house and filled the room with smoke and shattered glass. The women retreated to the back of the home, where Yolanda was sleeping. Coretta phoned First Baptist Church to report the bombing.

  Martin came home, found his wife and daughter unharmed, and went outside. An angry crowd of his supporters had gathered, and some of them carried guns. He turned them away with an impromptu speech. A lone witness, Ernest Walters, reported seeing a white man throw something at the door and speed off. Walters could not catch the license plate because it all happened so quickly.

  Both of the couple's fathers soon arrived. Obadiah Scott said he would take his daughter and granddaughter back to Marion unless Martin took them to Atlanta. Martin Sr. also urged her to leave. Coretta refused and insisted on staying with her husband. The author Octavia B. Vivian wrote, "That night Coretta lost her fear of dying." Coretta later called it the first time she realized how much she meant to Martin in supporting his work.

  On the 25th of April 1958, she performed at the Peter High School Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama. The concert was sponsored by a chapter of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. She told the story of the Montgomery bus boycott through the show, using the format from a New York gala two years earlier. For her, it was a way to keep her professional career alive while serving the movement.

  On the 3rd of September 1958, Martin was arrested outside a courtroom for loitering and failing to obey an officer. Coretta and Ralph Abernathy had been with him. A few weeks later, she was visiting Martin's parents in Atlanta when she learned he had been stabbed. It happened on the 20th of September 1958, while he was signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom. She rushed to his side and stayed with him for the rest of his hospital recovery.

  On the 3rd of February 1959, the Kings and Lawrence D. Reddick began a five-week tour of India. They were invited to hundreds of engagements, and Coretta used her singing to rouse the crowds. They returned to the United States on the 10th of March 1959.

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• 5. Presidents and the Bureau

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  After Martin's arrest on the 12th of April 1963, Coretta tried to reach President Kennedy on the advice of Wyatt Tee Walker. She had given birth to their fourth child, Bernice, on the 28th of March. Instead of the president, she reached his brother Robert F. Kennedy. President Kennedy was with his father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who was unwell. The president had her call sent to the White House switchboard. That choice made him seem less sympathetic to the Kings.

  The next day, Kennedy told her that the FBI had been sent into Birmingham the night before and that her husband was fine. She then issued her own statement about the president's help, rather than reporting to Walker as her husband had told her. The author Taylor Branch wrote that reports portrayed her as an anxious new mother who may have confused her White House fantasies with reality. Martin took the Kennedys' involvement as the reason "why everybody is suddenly being so polite."

  In April 1962, she had served as a delegate to the Women Strike for Peace conference in Geneva, Switzerland. In early November 1963, she spoke at the National Baptist Church in New York for the same group. She then joined its march from Central Park to the United Nations. The march marked the group's second anniversary and celebrated the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

  Her husband and she first heard that Kennedy had been shot when reports said he was only seriously wounded. She joined Martin upstairs, and they watched Walter Cronkite announce the president's death. She sat with her visibly shaken husband.

  The FBI knew from surveillance that Coretta opened her husband's mail while he traveled. So the Bureau planned to mail tapes of his alleged affairs to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference office, where she would find them. J. Edgar Hoover even advised mailing them from a southern state. Coretta sorted the tapes with the rest of the mail, listened to them, and called her husband at once. Her reaction gave the Bureau a great deal of pleasure.

  Martin played the tape in her presence, along with Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy and Joseph Lowery. Publicly she said, "I couldn't make much out of it, it was just a lot of mumbo-jumbo." The tapes were part of a larger campaign by Hoover to denounce King through revelations about his personal life.

  Most prominently, she worked hard to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She also spoke with Malcolm X days before his assassination. He told her he was not in Alabama to make trouble for her husband. His aim was to make white people value King's protests more by showing them the alternative.

  In January 1966, she criticized the movement's sexism in New Lady magazine. Men had formed the leadership, she said, but women had been "the backbone of the whole civil rights movement." Yet her husband himself limited her role and expected her to be a housewife.

  In January 1968, she joined a Women Strike for Peace protest in Washington, D.C., with over five thousand women. The group was named the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, after the first woman elected to the House of Representatives. Coretta co-chaired the Congress of Women conference with Pearl Willen and Mary Clarke.

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• 6. After Memphis

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  Jesse Jackson telephoned Coretta on the 4th of April 1968, as she came home from shopping with Yolanda. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. She had difficulty settling her children. To prepare five-year-old Bernice, she explained that the next time she saw her father he would be in a casket and would not speak. When her son Dexter asked when his father would return, Coretta lied and said he was only badly hurt. Among the many telegrams was one from Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald. Coretta said it touched her most.

  Senator Robert F. Kennedy had three more telephones installed in the King home to handle the flood of calls. He also offered a plane to take her to Memphis. The day after the assassination, she asked if he could persuade Jacqueline Kennedy to attend the funeral with him. Members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference warned her against accepting his help because of his presidential ambitions. She ignored them.

  On the 5th of April, she arrived in Memphis to retrieve her husband's body. She decided the casket should stay open at the funeral, hoping her children would see that he was not coming home. She also called the photographer Bob Fitch, whom she had known for years, and asked him to document the events. On the 7th of April, former Vice President Richard Nixon visited her and recalled his first meeting with her husband in 1955. Nixon attended the funeral on the 9th of April but did not walk in the procession. He thought that would be "grandstanding."

  On the 8th of April, she and her children headed a march with the sanitation workers that Martin had planned. At the staging area in front of Memphis City Hall, onlookers photographed them until she began speaking at a microphone. She said that although Martin was often away, his children knew Daddy loved them. Before the funeral, Jacqueline Kennedy met with her for five minutes. Coretta called the visit comforting. Robert and Ethel Kennedy came too, and Coretta embraced Ethel. When the service ended, she led her children and mourners in a march from the church to Morehouse College, her husband's alma mater.

  In the days after his death, she spoke at Ebenezer Baptist Church. She said her husband had told their children, "If a man had nothing that was worth dying for, then he was not fit to live." She ended by saying that "his spirit will never die."

  Soon afterward she took his place at a peace rally in New York City, using notes he had written before his death. On the 27th of April 1968, she spoke at an anti-war demonstration in Central Park, again working from notes found in his pockets. They included his "Ten Commandments on Vietnam." She said there was no reason why a nation as rich as the United States should be blighted by poverty, disease and illiteracy.

  She also approached the entertainer and activist Josephine Baker to take Martin's place in the movement. Baker thought it over and declined. Her twelve adopted children, whom she called her "rainbow tribe," were "too young to lose their mother."

  On the 5th of June 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot after winning the California primary, and he died the next day. Coretta flew to Los Angeles to comfort Ethel, who had spoken with her only two months earlier. On the 8th of June, while she attended the senator's funeral, the Justice Department announced the arrest of James Earl Ray.

  When the television journalist Mike Wallace visited the family at home, she said there would not be another Martin Luther King Jr. Such a man comes around "once in a century" or "maybe once in a thousand years." Her children needed her more than ever, she said, and there was hope for redemption in his death. By December 1968, in a Solidarity Day speech, she urged women to "unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war."

  In January 1969, she and Bernita Bennette left for a trip to India. On the way they stopped in Verona, Italy, where she received the Universal Love Award. She was the first non-Italian to win it. She also traveled to London to preach at St. Paul's Cathedral. No woman had ever delivered a sermon at a regularly appointed service there before. In 1969 she published her memoir, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. On the 15th of October 1969, she was the lead speaker at the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in Washington, D.C. She led a crowd bearing candles down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House.

  The FBI kept her under surveillance from 1968 until 1972. Documents obtained by a Houston television station show that the Bureau worried she would tie the anti-Vietnam movement to the civil rights movement. Agents studied her memoir and judged that her "selfless, magnanimous, decorous attitude is belied by... her actual shrewd, calculating, businesslike activities." A spokesman for the family said they knew about the surveillance, but had not realized how extensive it was.

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• 7. Guarding the Legacy

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  Two days after her husband's funeral, Coretta began planning a $15 million memorial that became the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. Supporters had started gathering Martin's papers in 1967, a year before his death. They were scattered across colleges and archives. After raising money from the private sector and the government, she financed the building of the complex in 1981. She served as the center's president and CEO until she passed the reins to her son, Dexter Scott King.

  In 1984, Hosea Williams, one of her husband's earliest followers, criticized her for promoting what the center called authentic material. He called the merchandise an attempt to exploit her husband. The kit included a wall poster, five photographs of King and his family, and a cassette of the I Have a Dream speech. It also held a booklet of tips for celebrating the holiday and five postcards with his quotations. Coretta had sanctioned the kit and denied the claim. She believed it was an authentic way to celebrate the holiday.

  Every year after 1968, Coretta attended a commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church on the 15th of January, her husband's birthday. In 1972, she said there should be at least one national holiday a year honoring an African-American man, and that "Martin is the best candidate we have." On the 14th of January 1979, the Atlanta attorney Murray M. Silver made an appeal at the services. She later called it the best, most productive appeal ever.

  On the 2nd of November 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the legislation establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and she was at the event. Reagan then called to apologize for a remark made at a televised conference. He had said the nation would know in "35 years" whether King was a communist sympathizer. He explained that the papers were sealed until 2027. She accepted the apology and noted that the Senate Select Committee on Assassinations had found no basis for communist ties. Her campaign ended in success in 1986, when the day became a federal holiday.

  In 1979 and 1980, she co-taught a class with Dr. Noel Erskine on "The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr." at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. On the 29th of September 1980, Ted Turner announced that she had signed as a commentator for CNN.

  In December 1987, she sued Boston University over more than 83,000 of her husband's documents. She said they belonged with the King archives. The university held her husband to his word. After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he had said his papers would stay at the college. Her lawyers argued that the statement was not binding, and noted that he had left no will. She testified that the university's president, John R. Silber, had demanded in a 1985 meeting that she send him the papers. Her statement said the South should be the repository of the bulk of the papers. With the King Center library complete, she said, it was time for the papers to come home.

  On the 6th of May 1993, a court rejected her claim. It found that a letter her husband wrote on the 16th of July 1964 was a binding charitable pledge to the university. She insisted that he had changed his mind.

  The King family has mostly been criticized for its handling of Martin's estate. In 1992, the family sued Superior Galleries in Los Angeles over a document it said was stolen. In 1994, USA Today paid the family $10,000 in legal costs and a $1,700 licensing fee for using the I Have a Dream speech without permission. In November 1996, the estate sued CBS for copyright infringement over a tape marketed with excerpts of the speech. CBS had filmed the speech in 1963 and paid the family no fee.

  On the 2nd of October 1998, the family sued Loyd Jowers after he said publicly that he had been paid to hire an assassin. The family contended the fatal shot came from a dense bushy area behind Jim's Grill. Ray's lawyers identified the shooter as Earl Clark, a police officer at the time, who had died years earlier. Jowers himself refused to name the man he claimed was the killer.

  On the 16th of November 1999, Coretta became the first family member to testify at the trial. She said Ray might have played a role but was not the one who really killed her husband. She called on President Bill Clinton to establish a national commission to investigate the assassination. In 1999, a jury found that her husband was the victim of a murder conspiracy.

  In 2000, she spoke about the planned monument to her husband in Washington, D.C. She said it would complete a group of memorials honoring democracy's greatest leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The National Park Service wanted to commemorate his dream but not discuss his opposition to the war in Vietnam or his struggle to end poverty. She fought to keep the history told there true to the movement.

  Martin had called her "Corrie" even while they were dating. Their marriage was not without friction. In 1964, the FBI captured a dispute in which each blamed the other for making the movement harder. When Martin missed a plane and sank into despair, she told him over the phone, "I believe in you, if that means anything." The author Ron Ramdin called her "the rock upon which his marriage and civil rights leadership" was founded.

  The Kings had four children, Yolanda, Martin III, Dexter and Bernice, and all four became activists. Bernice called her mother "My favorite person." She said her mother helped turn "the most hated man in America in 1968" into one of the most revered men in the world. Yet the King Center itself brought strain. Dexter resigned four months after becoming president, which has often been attributed to differences with his mother. During his tenure, staff fell from 70 to 14, and a child care center she had founded was removed.

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• 8. Causes and Farewell

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  On the 26th of June 1985, Coretta was arrested with her daughter Bernice and her son Martin III at an anti-apartheid protest at the Embassy of South Africa in Washington, D.C. In September 1986, she made a 10-day trip to South Africa. On the 9th of September, she cancelled meetings with President P. W. Botha and Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. The leadership of the UDF, Allan Boesak and Winnie Mandela had threatened to avoid her if she met them.

  The next day, she met Boesak, and also Winnie Mandela, calling that meeting "one of the greatest and most meaningful moments of my life." Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned in Pollsmoor Prison, after his transfer from Robben Island in 1982. Before leaving the United States, she had compared the civil rights movement to Mandela's case. Back home, she urged Reagan to approve economic sanctions against South Africa.

  In 1957, she was among the founders of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, now called Peace Action. She spoke in San Francisco while her husband spoke in New York at the anti-Vietnam march of the 15th of April 1967. The author Michael Eric Dyson called her "an earlier and more devoted pacifist than her husband." She objected to the word pacifism, though, preferring non-violent direct action. She also spoke out against capital punishment and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

  In August 1983, she urged Washington to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect gays and lesbians. After the Supreme Court's 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, her long-time friend Winston Johnson of Atlanta came out to her. He helped arrange for her to be the featured speaker at the Human Rights Campaign Fund gala in New York on the 27th of September 1986. There she said gays had "always been a part of the civil rights movement."

  On the 31st of March 1998, at the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's 25th anniversary luncheon, she addressed her critics. Some people told her to stick to racial justice. She reminded them that her husband had said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." She appealed to everyone who believes in his dream to "make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people." The next day in Chicago, she said homophobia, like racism, "seeks to dehumanize a large group of people."

  In 2003, she invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to observances of the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington. It was the first time an LGBTQ rights group had been invited to a major event of the African-American community. In 2004, during a university lecture in New Jersey, she affirmed her support for same-sex marriage.

  By the end of 2004, Coretta was having health problems, and her husband's former secretary, Dora McDonald, assisted her part-time. In April 2005, a month after speaking in Selma at the 40th anniversary of the voting rights movement, she was hospitalized with a heart condition. She went home on her 78th and final birthday. On the 16th of August 2005, she was hospitalized after a stroke and a mild heart attack. At first she could not speak or move her right side. She left Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta on the 22nd of September 2005, after regaining some of her speech.

  On the 14th of January 2006, she made her last public appearance at an Atlanta dinner honoring her husband's memory. On the 26th of January, she checked into a rehabilitation center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, under a different name. Doctors learned who she was only when her records arrived the next day. She died in the late evening of the 30th of January 2006 at the Oasis Hospital there. She had been undergoing holistic therapy for her stroke and advanced-stage ovarian cancer. Respiratory failure from complications of the cancer is believed to be the main cause.

  The clinic was called the Hospital Santa Mónica but was licensed as Clínica Santo Tomás. Reports said it was not legally licensed to perform surgery, take X-rays, run laboratory work or operate an internal pharmacy, all of which it was doing. Other reports said it was run by the controversial medical figure Kurt Donsbach. Medical commissioner Dr. Francisco Versa shut it down.

  Her body was flown to Atlanta on the 1st of February 2006. The funeral, held on the 7th of February at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia, lasted eight hours. Her daughter Bernice delivered the eulogy. Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter attended, along with their wives. Only Barbara Bush was absent, because of a previous engagement. The Ford family stayed away because of President Gerald Ford's illness. Senator Barack Obama, among other elected officials, attended the televised service. President Carter and Rev. Joseph Lowery delivered funeral orations that criticized the Iraq War and the wiretapping of the Kings.

  Julian Bond, the Georgia civil rights leader, boycotted the service. The funeral was conducted by Bishop Eddie Long, and Bond said he "just couldn't imagine that she'd want to be in that church with a minister who was a raving homophobe."

  She was first laid in a temporary grave on the grounds of the King Center. She had told family and others that she wanted to lie next to her husband there. On the 20th of November 2006, a new sarcophagus holding both of them was unveiled before friends and family. It was the third resting place of Martin Luther King and the second of Coretta.

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