Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott was born on the twenty-seventh of April 1927 at Heiberger, in Perry County, Alabama, to Obadiah and Bernice Scott, farming their own cotton land. She walked five miles to a one-room school, graduated valedictorian of Lincoln Normal School in Marion, took her degree at Antioch College in 1951, and went on scholarship to the New England Conservatory — where, in Boston in 1952, she met a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. They married in her parents' garden on the eighteenth of June 1953, and four children followed.

She was never merely beside the movement; she was in it. Their Montgomery home was bombed in 1956 and she did not leave; that December she gave the first of her Freedom Concerts — poetry, story, and song — whose proceeds fed the movement's treasuries; she marched at Washington and at Selma, and carried the work to Ghana, India, Geneva, and Oslo. When the shot came at Memphis in April 1968, she was in Atlanta with the children; she flew to Memphis the next day to bring him home — and four days after the assassination she led, with three of her children, the sanitation workers' march he had planned.

That June she founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and led it until 1995. She began the campaign for his holiday within days of his death and kept it alive fifteen years, until President Reagan signed it into law on the second of November 1983, the first observance coming in 1986. She stood arrested at the South African embassy in 1985 beside two of her children, trained new South African voters in nonviolence before 1994, and in her last decade called the civil-rights community, plainly and publicly, to stand against homophobia and for the freedom to marry.

A stroke felled her in 2005; she died on the thirtieth of January 2006, at seventy-eight, at a clinic in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, where she had sought treatment for advanced ovarian cancer. Georgia laid her in honor in its Capitol rotunda — the first woman and the first African American so honored there — and she rests beside Martin at the Center she built. Honored be Coretta Scott King, who buried her husband on a Tuesday and marched on the Monday before.