Coretta Scott King, Civil Rights Leader
CORETTA SCOTT KING, the civil rights leader and wife of Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Marion in 1927, and raised here. On June 18th, 1953, she married Martin Luther King, Jr. here. She was also an accomplished musician, author, and public speaker and the best interpreter of the scope and meaning of her husband’s life.
Her childhood was solid. In the 1930’s and ‘40’s, the Scott family was not wealthy but they had a certain status from owning their own land; they’d owned a farm in Marion or just outside town since just after the Civil War. Obadiah Scott, Coretta’s father was a man of courage and rectitude.
He and Coretta’s mother, Bernice McMurry Scott, were determined to educate their four children well, and they did a fine job raising them in a climate of thick white racism. Never doubt yourself or your own worth, they told their children. White supremacy is a sad blindness. It has some vicious offshoots, so be careful around whites, but it’s THEIR sickness, not ours.
As a child, Coretta was a boisterous tomboy. Climbing trees, wrestling with boys. Her childhood friends were amused by the image Coretta projected in middle age: serene and composed, shoulders square, makeup tasteful, the perfect lady. That wasn’t the Coretta they remembered.
It’s worth noting, though, that the boisterous tomboy was also her high school’s valedictorian, had a fine singing voice, and was a soloist in church. Coretta had a fierce ambition. Optimism and realism battled inside her. Optimism told her that somehow she would achieve much more than the racist, sexist world expected, but a sturdy realism told her she’d have to make the most of her chances.
True to her ambitious upbringing, Coretta when to college — and not to some local Alabama school for “Negroes” but to Antioch College in Ohio. At college graduation, when most women of her generation were thinking of marriage, Coretta had her mind set on graduate school.
She moved to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory of Music. There she found that neither her singing voice nor her college degree from Antioch were nearly as rare and impressive as they were in small town Alabama. She was also now far outside the embrace of her supportive family. Launching a career as a professional singer would require hiring an elite voice coach at rates she couldn’t afford. White racism would make professional achievement that much harder.
She sensed that living on Beacon Hill in Boston would help; it would give her a fashionable address. A boardinghouse on Beacon Hill agreed to give her room and board in exchange for Coretta’s working there as a maid. She never presented herself as a maid; she did the menial work required but always thought of herself as a singer-in-training of classical music.
In 1952, a man telephoned her. She had no idea who he was, but he seemed determined to take her out on a date. Annoyed, she asked how he’d gotten her number. He replied that a friend had given it to him then rushed on to say “You know, every Napoleon has his Waterloo. I’m like Napoleon, I’m at my Waterloo and I’m on my knees.”
She told the caller that canned “lines” like this were a turn-off, but he refused to be discouraged. He spoke of the coursework he was doing at Boston University, so she could see he was intellectual. He teased her a little, and skillfully used self-deprecation and humor. He said his name was Martin Luther King, Jr. and that he came from a line of preachers. He asked her, again, to go out with him. Somewhat dubiously, she agreed to a date.
Coretta and Martin had lunch, and the conversation moved from the highly philosophical to the glories of soul food.
She was disappointed by how short this Martin King was but, like so many people who spent time with him, she found he seemed to grow taller as he spoke. His mind was broad and mischievous and his voice a marvelous instrument. He told her he was going to be a preacher, like his important father, Martin Luther King, Sr. He was from Atlanta, the capital of southern black America.
After lunch, Martin drove Coretta back to the New England Conservatory and remarked to her, almost casually, that she would make him a good wife. She was appalled at his presumption. Despite the look on her face, he launched into his reasons. He wanted a wife with character, intelligence, personality and beauty, and she possessed all four of these qualities. She met his qualifications.
They continued to date. She was confused — she liked him and was impressed by his ambition. He knew how to make her laugh. But she was put off by the way that he presumed she should love him and want to marry him. She worried about his high-toned connections, and his father’s fame and power in the Negro community of Atlanta. Did she want to be a preacher’s wife? Would she be able to stand up to the extended King family?
On June 18th, 1953, in Marion, Coretta and Martin were married. Coretta was pleased that Martin and his family had agreed to have the wedding in Marion, on the Scott’s home ground, far from fancy Atlanta. Nor did Martin seem to want to settle in Atlanta, which was a relief for Coretta. Coretta also convinced Martin to remove from the wedding vows the phrase about a wife having to “obey” her husband.
Martin’s father “Daddy King” insisted on performing the wedding ceremony, and hurt Coretta deeply by taking the bride and groom aside, just moments before the wedding, and telling them it was not too late to back out. He said he preached Christian sermons because every fiber of his being wanted to share the Lord’s good news. Marrying should be like that, he said in his thunderous way. If there were any doubts at all, they should cancel the ceremony.
Bride and groom took this in, and went through with the wedding ceremony. Since none of the “finer” Alabama hotels welcomed African-Americans, they spent their wedding night at a funeral home belonging to a family friend.
Martin began preaching in Montgomery, in 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to someone with lighter skin, Martin became the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and suddenly life began to swirl, as the bus boycott grew into something much broader, inspiring to many, all over the world but also threatening and infuriating to many whites determined to keep African-Americans “in their place.”
On the evening of January 30, 1956, a bomb went off in the King home, while Martin was out preaching and Coretta was home with their ten-week-old daughter Yolanda. Imagine being Coretta at that moment. You and your precious baby daughter could very easily have been killed that day. Your husband is doing very important work — but seems to be putting his whole family in mortal danger.
Already one home-made bomb has gone off and there may be more coming. Broken glass is everywhere. The mayor, the police commissioner and the fire chief are standing in your living room, and they’re not happy. A newspaper reporter is there, digging for a story. Searchlights are flashing, sirens are sounding, while good women from your church are singing “My Country Tis of Thee” and a furious African-American man is screaming for whites to come shoot it out with .38’s. Neighbor men have arrived with guns and knives and little boys are there with broken pop bottles, ready to do battle.
Would you urge your courageous husband to stick with his civil rights work?
Their home partly in ruins, the King’s spent that night at the home of friends in Montgomery named Brooks. Still in shock from the bombing, unable to sleep well, Coretta and Martin were woken twice before morning by an angry pounding on the front door. Once it was Martin Luther King, Sr. at the door. The other time it was Obadiah Scott. Both fathers of the young couple had the same message: ‘It’s time to leave Montgomery.’
Martin rejected the idea; he argued that he owed it to the black community in Montgomery to stay, to see things through. Martin’s father waved that off, saying, “It’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion!” Obadiah Scott was also adamant; he didn’t want his daughter and granddaughter living in such peril.
Coretta Scott King was the key figure now: if she had demanded to leave town, her husband would almost certainly have walked off the stage in Montgomery. But she backed him up, and said she meant to stay. She was now married not only to Martin, but to the civil rights movement.
No one was ever arrested for the bombing; the Montgomery police never seemed interested in cracking the case. But Coretta often said in later days that the bombing of her home was, in perverse way, a sort of blessing, because it released her ever after from the fear of death.
She lived a true life of sacrifice. By 1958, the death threats to Martin Luther King were almost constant, and both of them knew that at some point he would likely lose his life to an assassin. Yet she never lost sight of the goal, or of the good times they’d had.
There is a tendency in writing about Dr. King’s magnificent work in civil rights to put Coretta in the background. It’s often been written how, in October of 1960, Dr. King sat-in at Rich’s Department Store, and was arrested, shackled and handcuffed and transferred — at night — to a maximum security prison in Reidsville, Georgia. Many people felt he would never leave that prison alive.
Then, as the story’s written, within the week, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, called Coretta from a Chicago hotel room, voicing concern over her husband’s treatment. The story casts Dr. King as the brave hero, and John Kennedy as the concerned onlooker — and able politician. Coretta is cast as the worried wife.
She was so much more than that — a tough lady and a true idealist, who held a lot of things inside. She bore and raised the children of a husband who was often traveling and often distracted by his preaching duties and civil rights work when he was at home.
After Martin was murdered in 1968, she tirelessly drove home the principles of his life. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Hate only poisons the hater. Revenge and retaliation are always wrong. To think and act non-violently, while under oppression, is an act not of weakness but of strength.
She founded the King Center, a non-profit institution promoting research, education and training in the principles and methods of non-violent direct action, in the United States and around the world. Coretta became active in the women’s movement, and was the chief player in the campaign to make her husband’s birthday a national holiday.
When people came to her with anger, she suggested trying to “purge the self,” to broaden our life’s view. And she liked to say that “Struggle is a never-ending process” and that, in every generation, freedom is something that must be redefined and earned anew.
She used to tour college campuses, and ask for a show of hands of how many people believed in her husband’s message. A great show of hands would ensue. Almost everyone in the audience.
“Now, how many of you are registered to vote?” she would ask. “Raise your hands.” A much smaller number of hands went up. Coretta would say, ‘If you are not registered to vote, you have not fully embraced my husband’s message.’
The midwife at her birth, Coretta’s great-grandmother, had been born a slave. By the time Coretta Scott King died of ovarian cancer in 2006, great progress had been made. But not enough, she always gently but firmly reminded us. Not NEARLY enough.