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A Full Partner in The Dream
Her Own Dreams
As a young girl, Mrs. King knew she wanted something better than the segregated life that rural Alabama could give her. She witnessed the disparities in education between black and white students, noting once that she had to walk six miles, no matter the weather, to and from her one-room elementary school while white students were bused to brick buildings in nearby Marion.
Her parents taught her that education was the path to freedom. She said her mother forcefully told her: "You get an education and try to be somebody. Then you won't have to be kicked around by anybody, and you won't have to depend on anyone for your livelihood -- not even a man."
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Coretta Scott King Dies at 78 Coretta Scott King turned a life shattered by her husband's assassination into one devoted to enshrining his legacy. She died Tuesday, Jan. 31, at the age of 78. |
Her parents paid the $4.50-a-year tuition to send her to Lincoln High School in Marion, a semiprivate school for blacks run by the American Missionary Association.
Her musical talents blossomed there with teachers she admired greatly. She learned to play the flutophone, the trumpet and the piano and skillfully performed in various school programs. She also developed her talents as a singer.
After graduating as valedictorian of her high school class in 1945, Mrs. King enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, following in the footsteps of her older sister, Edythe, the first black student to attend the college. At Antioch, she encountered racism not unlike what she had experienced growing up in Alabama. She also found her voice and her resolve as an activist.
She called it "an unfortunate thing" when she was "the first Negro" to major in elementary education, because it required her to teach a year in an Ohio public elementary school, which the Yellow Springs School Board would not allow her to do.
Although disillusioned, she became more motivated than ever to see that what happened to her wouldn't happen to others. She joined the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a race-relations committee and a civil liberties committee. "I was active on all of them," she wrote. "From the first, I had been determined to get ahead not just for myself, but to do something for my people and for all people."
Nevertheless, she was grateful for the opportunities that Antioch afforded her, among them the chance to appear on a program with famous baritone Paul Robeson.
A Life-Altering Meeting
After graduating in 1951, she followed her desire to develop her voice as a concert artist by studying at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Less than a year had passed when she was introduced to a young minister who was a seminary student at Boston University, and her life took a detour.
The two married on June 18, 1953, at the Scotts' home in Alabama, and then the young students returned to Boston to complete their studies. She graduated with a music degree in 1954, and he received his doctoral degree.
That same year, the couple moved to Montgomery, Ala., where he took over the pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and she began her duties as a pastor's wife. Within a year, the Montgomery bus boycott was ignited when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus, and King was thrust into the spotlight as the leader of the historic boycott.
Mrs. King, by then the mother of their first child, Yolanda, joined her husband in the rights demonstrations from Montgomery to Memphis that ultimately changed the country's most discriminatory laws. Throughout the births of their other three children, she also was actively involved in organizing and planning marches and protests.
She lent her finely tuned singing voice to a series of "Freedom Concerts" that she originated to raise money for the SCLC and sometimes gave speeches in her husband's stead. She traveled throughout the world with King, spending a month with him on his pilgrimage to India in 1959 and accompanying him to Oslo in 1964 to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
After his death, Mrs. King broadened the scope of her vision and her speeches beyond race. She called for women of all hues "to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war." She coordinated the Coalition of Conscience in 1983, which sponsored the 20th anniversary of the March on Washington, and attended a nuclear disarmament conference in Geneva.
Mrs. King riled some civil rights leaders in 1997 when she called for a new trial for James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing her husband. She had believed, like some others, that Ray was not the true killer but that a government intelligence agency committed the crime.
Mrs. King's last public appearance was Jan. 14 at a "Salute to Greatness" dinner in Atlanta, a fundraiser for the King Center. It also celebrated the 20th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. She smiled graciously from her wheelchair, receiving a standing ovation from the 1,500 guests surprised and pleased by her presence.
Survivors include four children, a sister and a brother.
