Coretta Scott King: A Hero to America

Coretta Scott King, the wife of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., died Monday night at the age of 78, according to CNN. The iconic leader of the nation's first family of civil rights had been ill since August, when she was admitted to hospital in Atlanta after suffering a stroke and a heart attack.Following the assassination of her husband on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, Scott King picked up his mantle and became the leading face of the civil rights movement in America, leading the push to have his birthday declared a national holiday and honoring his legacy through her work on issues ranging from the fight against gun violence to battling AIDS and speaking out against apartheid in South Africa. Like Jacqueline Kennedy, Scott King was the face of public grief following her husband's murder. With her legendarily stoic and regal bearing, she led a civil rights march through the streets of Memphis in the days that followed his death and took his place at the head of the Poor People's March in Washington, D.C., a month later.Born on April 27, 1927 near Marion, Alabama, Scott King was raised on her parents' farm, where early on she encountered examples of the divisive nature of race relations in America. As the family struggled in her early days, Scott King and her siblings picked cotton during the Depression to help them through the hard times.After her father's truck-farming business became successful in the 1940s, her family faced harassment from white neighbors and were the victims of a suspicious fire in 1942 that destroyed their home. Encouraged by her parents to seek educational opportunities, Scott King enrolled in Antioch College in Ohio in 1945 — where her older sister had become the first black student — and received a bachelor's degree in music and elementary education. While attending the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, she began dating Martin Luther King Jr., who was studying at Boston University's School of Theology.The couple married at the Scott home in Alabama on June 18, 1953. As her husband was ascending to his position as the iconic leader of the civil rights struggle in the United States, Scott King remained mostly behind the scenes, raising the couple's four children, Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott and Bernice Albertine.Scott King was at her husband's side, however, during many of his most important speeches and actions. In 1960, she appealed to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy to help secure Dr. King's release from a Georgia prison after his arrest during a sit-in at a lunch counter in Atlanta protesting its refusal to serve blacks. Kennedy's action to gain King's release is credited with helping him win over the crucial African-American vote in the 1960 election.She was also on hand in Oslo, Norway, in 1964 when her husband was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and was active in "freedom concerts" during the mid-1960s in which music, poetry and lectures were used to paint a history of the civil rights movement. Following her husband's assassination, Scott King continued to espouse his philosophy of nonviolent resistance and led a march for sanitation workers in Memphis just weeks after his death. In May 1968, she was at the forefront of the Poor People's Campaign, a march on Washington, D.C., to highlight the issue of poverty. In 1969 she published her autobiography, My Life With Martin Luther King Jr..In an effort to keep Dr. King's legacy alive, Scott King helped found the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in 1969, which features an institute for Afro-American studies, a library with King's papers and a museum housed next to Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King had served as co-pastor with his father.Scott King continued to be a figurehead for the civil rights movement into the 1980s, leading a 20th anniversary march on Washington in 1983, during which half a million people celebrated the anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. One of Scott King's most enduring actions was her long fight to establish a national holiday on January 15 honoring her late husband. — Gil Kaufman
Words cannot even describe the positive impact Coretta Scott King left on the world. She was by far one of the most underrated figures in the peak of the civil rights movement. She's looking down from heaven now, talking with her husband about how the world has changed, and what should be changed. RIP Coretta.