Coretta Scott King (1927-2006) was an amazing witness to Christian faith and human courage and compassion.

Coretta Scott King (1927-2006) is known around the world as the widow of THE icon of the Civil Rights Movement and one of the most famous nonviolent activists in history.  Not as many people know that this courageous woman was a nonviolent human rights activist in her own right--even before she met her more famous husband.  This tribute is my small attempt to set the record straight.

Coretta Scott was born in Marion, AL to rural sharecroppers (Obie Leonard Scott and Bernice McMurry Scott)  who shared a deep hunger for freedom and justice and a vibrant Christian faith rooted in their African Methodist Episcopal (AME) faith.   Her family's sacrifice allowed Coretta to go to Lincoln High School, a private black school with an integrated faculty, where she graduated as class valedictorian and won a full scholarship to Antioch College (now Antioch University) in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Antioch is a white-majority university with roots in the Methodist tradition, especially the abolitionist strand of that heritage.  At Antioch, Coretta committed herself to Christian pacifism and the struggle for justice.  It was during her Antioch days that she joined local chapters of the NAACP, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and the Young Progressives, attending a Progressive Party convention in 1948 as a student delegate.  She graduated from Antioch in 1949 with a B.A. in music and elementary education.

With the help of a scholarship from the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, Coretta continued her education at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music, earning a Bachelor of Music degree in voice and intending to have a career as a concert singer of classical music.  It was while she was working on this degree that she met a young Martin Luther King, Jr., a doctoral candidate in philosophical theology at Boston University.  King, who was at the time searching for a "minister's wife," was given Coretta's number by a mutual friend.  Since his teens, the smooth-talking King had had a reputation as a ladies' man, but Coretta was initially unimpressed.  She thought he was too short and that, two years her junior, he looked like a boy.  Eventually, however, King won her over, but she refused to answer his marriage proposal for months because she had no desire to fit into the stereotypical role of a Baptist minister's wife in the pre-feminist, segregated, South--and throughout his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. shared many of the sexist views of the "role of wives" common for his day.

No sooner than she consented to marry King, however, than Coretta had to overcome the objections of Martin's parents who wanted him to marry a woman from Atlanta's black bourgeousie and a "good Baptist girl" rather than this Methodist woman from rural Alabama. Coretta held her own against the domineering personality of "Daddy" King and she and Martin were married at the Scott family home on June 18 1953.

The patriarchal views of both Martin and the culture, plus the struggle to raise four children with a largely absent husband and father, kept Coretta in the background during much of her husband's public career (1955-1968).  Coretta was nearly a de facto single parent to Yolanda Denise (b. 1955), Martin Luther III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott (b. 1961), and Bernice Albertine (b. 1963) long before she became a widow in 1968.  However, that did not stop her from playing a behind-the-scenes role in many Civil Rights campaigns, nor did assure safety for her or the children--as they found when their home in Montgomery, AL was bombed during the Bus Boycott in 1955.  She was a very public presence when Martin King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and during the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965.  She put her musical training to use giving concerts throughout the North to raise money for the movement. 

Coretta was a convinced pacifist from college onward, while King was still on his "pilgrimage to nonviolence," and had not become fully committed to nonviolence as more than a tactic in social struggle.  Martin became fully persuaded of nonviolence as a way of life in the midst of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in dialogue with Bayard Rustin of the War Resisters' League and Glenn Smiley of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the oldest grassroots religiously based peace group.  From later remarks of MLK, Jr. acknowledging that she was fully committed to nonviolence before he was, it is possible to conclude that Coretta was also a catalyst in Martin's "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence."  It was Coretta who urged Martin to join her in joining the F.O.R.  Both were lifelong members from 1955 onwards.  When the opportunity arose for the Kings to go to India in 1959, it was Coretta who urged Martin to take this opportunity to visit the land of Gandhi and learn from contemporary Gandhians in India.

Initially, the politics of the Civil Rights movement constrained Martin King from speaking out as strongly on the issue of war and peace as he wanted to--he was supposed to stick to the subject of civil rights according to other African-American leaders.  Coretta was not as constrained and she was a regular speaker in peace movement events, with Martin's blessing, as early as 1962.  In 1962, Coretta went as a delegate from Women Strike for Peace to the 17-nation disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland.  When Martin was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Coretta urged him to link the civil rights struggle with other world struggles for justice and peace in his acceptance speech, which he did.  From 1964 onward, the Nobel Laureate constantly saw militarism, poverty/materialism, and racism as intertwining problems and part of a single system of structural evil that had to be opposed together--no one of these forces could be defeated without addressing the others.  Even after Martin began speaking out more strongly against war in general and the Vietnam War in particular in 1967, Coretta continued to lead as a peace activist.

After Martin's tragic death in 1968, Coretta led the march with striking sanitation workers in Memphis, TN that King was supposed to lead before he was assassinated.  She helped to lead the Poor People's Campaign in 1968 and began to take a more public role as a human rights activist.  She joined the fledgling National Association for Women (NOW) and became a powerful voice for women's rights, especially campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment.  She also formed the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and served as its first president.  From that post, she worked to establish the national holiday in honor of Dr. King on his birthday, published her autobiography, My Life with Martin Luther King (1969), worked to establish the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project with Stanford University scholar Clayton Carson.  Also in 1969, the American Library Association's Social Responsibilities Round Table established the Coretta Scott King Award presented annually to an African American author and an African American illustrator for a book that promoted the values of the King family.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Coretta Scott King was a voice for human rights and peace.  She helped to establish Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, an organization dedicated to abolishing the death penalty and working to end violent crime and retribution.  She consulted with world leaders and leaders of freedom and justice movements around the world, including Kenneth Kaunda, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Corrie Aquino, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, Cesar Chavez, and others.  She promoted Middle East peace, peace in Ireland, nonviolent struggle in Africa and Asia.  In the 1990s, even as one of her children invoked Martin King's name in a campaign to restrict the civil rights of gays and lesbians, Coretta spoke in full defense of gay and lesbian rights, supporting groups like PFLAG and Soulforce.  She reminded people of the central role that Bayard Rustin, an openly gay black man who was the central planner of the 1963 March on Washington, played in the Civil Rights movement and that her husband often said that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

In August 2005, Coretta suffered a mild stroke and heart attack that restricted her activities.  While in Baja, California, Mexico, Coretta Scott King died in her sleep on January 30 2006, apparently of another heart attack.  Her life is an amazing witness to Christian faith and human courage and compassion.

-Michael Westmoreland-White