Coretta Scott King’s Untold Story

As part of our series this week, honoring MLK day 2021, the presidential inauguration with the most diversity ever thus far, we wanted to share a bit more about another powerful Black woman leader, who is often not given the respect and attention she deserves for her role in the civil rights movement.

She was more than just the wife of Dr. King.

In the hopes we as a country are moving more into inclusivity in all ways, we hope you enjoy her story, the story of Coretta Scott King:

hen Coretta Scott King died in January 2006, flags flew at half mast. Scott King’s body lay in honor in the Georgia state capitol – a far cry from thirty-eight years earlier, when then governor Lester Maddox refused to close state offices and stationed state troopers outside to make sure the capitol wouldn’t be contaminated by the body of her late husband, Martin Luther King, Jr., and to prevent mourners from storming the capitol.

Scott King was praised as “kind and gentle,” “obedient,” and “beautiful,” and defined principally as her husband’s “helpmate,” rather than as the peace and social justice activist she was for her entire life. 

President George W. Bush journeyed to Georgia for her funeral, where he praised her strength and her beauty: “In all her years, Coretta Scott King showed that a person of conviction and strength could also be a beautiful soul.”

When Bush decided to attend the funeral, longtime King family friend and Bush critic Harry Belafonte, who’d been scheduled to give a eulogy, was disinvited –perhaps because he would serve as a potent reminder of Scott King’s enduring critique of US racism and war making.

In similar fashion three months earlier, when Rosa Parks died, Parks’ coffin laid in honor in the nation’s capitol, the first woman ever to be so honored. Parks was eulogized as the “accidental matriarch of the civil rights movement” and incessantly referred to as “quiet,” “soft -spoken,” and “not-angry.”

Stripped of their long histories of activism and their continuing critiques of American injustice, both Parks and Scott King were held up and honored as self-sacrificing mother figures for a nation which uses their deaths for a ritual of national redemption.

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During her life, Coretta Scott King lamented how she was too often seen but not heard, admired but not considered in her substance. “I am made to sound like an attachment to a vacuum cleaner,” she explained, “the wife of Martin, then the widow of Martin, all of which I was proud to be. But I was never just a wife, nor a widow. I was always more than a label.”

Not simply an accessory of her husband’s, Coretta’s activism complemented and at times led Martin’s politics. Her memorialization as wife and helpmate, and the corresponding backgrounding of her lifelong political commitments, misses the wider critique of social injustice that underlay her life’s work.

Born on April 27, 1927, in Marion, Alabama, Coretta Scott graduated valedictorian from Lincoln High School. Her childhood was marked by racial violence: as a teenager, her home and her father’s sawmill were burned down.

Attending Antioch College, she became politically involved in the campus NAACP, the Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees, and various peace activities. An accomplished singer, she earned a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music, where she received her bachelor of music degree. It was in Boston where she met Martin Luther King Jr., who was working on his doctorate at Boston University.

Scott, according to King biographer Clayborne Carson, “was more politically active at the time they met than Martin was.” Independent and “ferociously informal,” according to James Baldwin, Scott worried about how “circumscribed” her life might become if she married a pastor.

Part of the attraction between Coretta and Martin was political, as letters between the two of them reveal. While they were courting, Coretta sent Martin a copy of Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopian novel, Looking Backward, with the note: “I shall be interested to know your reactions to Bellamy’s predictions about our future.”

She later told James Baldwin that her emerging relationship came to feel “somehow, preordained.” But as she made clear, “The media never understood Martin so they will never understand Coretta. I didn’t learn my commitment from Martin, we just converged at a certain time.”

They married in June 1953, Coretta insisting that “obey” be removed from their wedding vows.

In September 1954, the couple moved to Montgomery, where Martin had received his first pastorship at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Montgomery would be where Martin’s civil rights commitment first caught national attention, when he emerged as the young leader and spokesman of the Montgomery bus boycott.

Coretta played a decisive role there as well. Seven weeks into the boycott, the Kings’ house was bombed. Coretta and their ten-week-old baby daughter Yolanda were at home when the bomb went off , but they escaped uninjured. Terrified by this violence, both Martin and Coretta’s fathers traveled to Montgomery to pressure the family – or at least Coretta and baby Yolanda – to leave. She refused.

As she explained later, “This was a very trying time, when everyone seemed frightened. I realized how important it was for me to stand with Martin. And the next morning at breakfast he said, ‘Coretta, you have been a real soldier. You were the only one who stood with me.’” Had Coretta Scott King flinched in this moment, the trajectory of the bus boycott and the emerging civil rights movement might have been very different.

While the Montgomery bus boycott is customarily seen as the advent of Martin Luther King’s leadership, Scott King was vital to its emergence. “During the bus boycott I was tested by fire and I came to understand that I was not a breakable crystal figurine,” she said. “I found I became stronger in a crisis.”

During the year of the boycott, their phone rang incessantly with hate calls, and Coretta often had to answer them. She took to quipping, “My husband is asleep … He told me to write the name and number of anyone who called to threaten his life so that he could return the call and receive the threat in the morning when he wakes up and is fresh.”

•••

Active in racial justice politics and the peace movement before marrying Martin King, Coretta Scott King spoke up earlier and more forcefully against American involvement in Vietnam than her husband did, and her critique of American economics and war making continued for decades after his death.

Scott King’s peace activism included a global vision and, in many ways, her commitments to global peacemaking helped inspire Martin’s. In 1957, she was one of the founders of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. In 1958, Scott King spoke on her husband’s behalf at the Youth March for Integrated Schools. Drawing inspiration from India’s march to the sea, led by Mohandas Gandhi, and from the Underground Railroad, she praised the young people for “proving that the so-called ‘silent generation’ is not so silent.”

In 1959, she and her husband traveled to India for five weeks to learn from Gandhi’s work, meeting with India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and dozens of local leaders and activists. In 1962, she was a delegate for the Women’s Strike for Peace to the seventeen-nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Joining the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she became even more vocal on peace issues as US involvement in Vietnam escalated in the early 1960s.

With four kids, Scott King had to contend with her husband’s contradictory beliefs on women’s roles – his appreciation of her politics and his conviction that she should stay home to raise the children. Forced to scale back her singing, she continued to do benefit concerts for the movement: “I once told Martin that although I loved being his wife and a mother, if that was all I did I would have gone crazy. I felt a calling on my life from an early age. I knew I had something to contribute to the world.”

After he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, she stressed to him “the role you must play in achieving world peace, and I will be so glad when the time comes when you can assume that role.” Following the award, she pressed him to make the international dimension of the philosophy of nonviolence more prominent; their belief in nonviolence and commitment to human rights necessitated speaking out on global human rights as well as domestic ones. The work and responsibility that came with the award were clear to her: “I felt pride and joy and pain too, when I thought of the added responsibilities my husband must bear and it was my burden too.”

The death threats and continued harassment took their toll. In 1966, she explained the effect of John F. Kennedy’s assassination to reporter Trina Grillo: “It seemed worse than seeing a member of my own family dying … a feeling of complete despair. After that, Malcolm X’s assassination disturbed me more than anything else. I was depressed for several days.”

While her husband wavered in publicly speaking out against the Vietnam War, having been attacked severely for his early criticisms of US military escalation, Coretta Scott King remained steadfast in her public opposition to the war. In 1965, two years before her husband’s famous sermon against the war at Riverside Church, she addressed an antiwar rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the only woman to address the crowd.

Late in 1965, when her husband backed out of an address to a Washington, DC, peace rally, she kept her commitment to speak. Following her appearance, a reporter asked Martin if he had educated his wife on these issues. He replied: “She educated me.”

Coretta continued to push her husband to take a stronger public stand against the war. In April 1967, Martin Luther King made his public declaration against the war at Riverside Church, decrying the resources being diverted from the War on Poverty to wage war in Vietnam, and the deployment of Black soldiers to a conflict thousands of miles away when their rights were not guaranteed at home – and was lambasted for it. The FBI continued to actively surveil Scott King for years after her husband’s death, fearing she “would tie the anti-Vietnam movement to the civil rights movement.”

After her husband’s assassination in Memphis, where he had gone to take part in a sanitation workers’ strike, Coretta Scott King stepped in to fill the political void. Four days later, she led the march he was supposed to have headed. “I gave a speech from the heart and some people ‘saw’ me for the first time,” she recalled.

Understanding the tremendous work to be done in the wake of Martin’s assassination, she committed to carrying on the fight for racial and economic justice, making clear that this was how his death was to be honored: “The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace.”

Martin had been working to build a poor people’s movement to descend on Washington and engage in massive civil disobedience to make poor people un-ignorable and force Congress and the president to action. But it was Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, and a host of other antipoverty activists across the country who took up the task of actually enacting the plans.

Even though her husband had kept a distance from welfare rights, Coretta linked the struggle for economic justice to the need for a real safety net for poor families.

On May 1, Scott King launched the southern caravan of the Poor People’s Campaign from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, singing “Sweet Little Jesus Boy.” She declared her own dream, “where not some but all of God’s children have food, where not some but all of God’s children have decent housing, where not some but all of God’s children have a guaranteed annual income in keeping with the principles of liberty and grace.”

Alongside her commitment to welfare rights, Scott King stressed unemployment as a crucial issue to be addressed: “if we could solve the unemployment problem most of the social problems we have could be solved. In fact, most of the social problems stem from unemployment.” Guaranteed jobs, Scott King believed, was a way to link the needs of Black and white workers, who were often pitted against each other.

She also critiqued stereotypes of poor Black women as lazy, loud, castrating figures as a way to further disfigure women who advocated for themselves and their families and to take attention away from the structural causes of Black poverty. Her analysis of poverty highlighted the intersections of race and gender that often kept Black women poor and disregarded.

At several marches and rallies, Scott King criticized the hypocrisy of a society “where violence against poor people and minority groups is routine.” In doing so, she reframed the political language of the time, foregrounding issues of economic violence that were prevalent in American society. “More forcefully than her husband had articulated,” King biographer Thomas Jackson explained, “Coretta King connected poverty and policy neglect to systemic social violence.”

Indeed, she reminded the nation of its own acts of violence: “Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence … Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence. Even the lack of will power to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.”

•••

Scott King’s activism did not simply uphold her husband’s legacy but expanded it. She understood the need for a unified Black power and, according to historian Komozi Woodard, was a key driving force behind the 1972 Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana.

In the 1980s, she took an active role in the anti-apartheid movement and in 1984 was arrested outside the South African embassy. Traveling to South Africa, she subsequently met with President Reagan to urge divestment.

To the end of her life, she continued her international peace work. In the months leading up to the second Iraq War, Scott King came out against the invasion.

She also became a vocal advocate of gay rights and a supporter of same-sex marriage. In the late 1990s, despite criticisms from civil rights leaders and her own children, she reminded the nation that “Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.”

Scott King saw the struggle for gay rights as intimately connected to the one for racial justice and stood firm against those who would cast the battle for gay rights as dishonoring the spirit of the civil rights movement. In 2001, she highlighted the threat of AIDS as “one of the most deadly killers of African-Americans. And I think anyone who sincerely cares about the future of black America had better be speaking out.”

Decrying the dangers of legalized injustice, she opposed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and reminded Americans that “gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil unions.”

While her husband was alive, Scott King had struggled with being marginalized in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in part because she was a “strong woman, not one to be pushed aside …” According to biographer Barbara Reynolds, after Martin’s assassination, “Many of the men told her she should step aside, and let them run things” but she refused.

“Most thought that women should stay in the shadows,” Scott King explained, “however I felt that as women, we had much to contribute. In fact for the longest time, way before I married Martin, I had believed that women should allow our essence and presence to shine, rather than letting ourselves be buried or shunted to the sidelines.”

In a way similar to how she was treated in those years, there has been a tendency in popular histories of the movement to marginalize her work and focus only on her efforts to preserve her husband’s legacy. These erasures of Coretta Scott King’s broader life and activism dovetail with public erasures of Black women’s leadership at the time.

While women took on key roles in the Black freedom struggle, there were numerous moments when their contributions were marginalized. Scott King herself had noted these gender inequalities in a 1966 article in New Lady: “Not enough attention has been focused on the roles played by women in the struggle … Women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement … Women have been the ones who have made it possible for the movement to be a mass movement.” (She purposefully mailed a copy of this article to Rosa Parks, inscribing it “To Mrs. Rosa Parks with love, respect and deep admiration Coretta Scott King.”)

“I am not a ceremonial symbol,” Scott King once said. “I am an activist. I didn’t just emerge after Martin died – I was always there and involved.” But her leadership and that of many women in the movement have not been fully recognized. Even amidst national tributes for women like Scott King and Rosa Parks, their larger political commitments and lifelong activism often get left out. Honoring Scott King and Parks too often has become a way for the nation to separate and distract itself from injustice in the present, consigning their critiques of American society to distant history even though both women continued to speak out on racial justice and human rights in our own time. 

(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/03/coretta-scott-king-extract)