A lasting activism for Coretta Scott King

She fought to keep her slain husband's dream alive

BY MARTIN C. EVANS | Newsday Staff Writer

January 16, 2007

Coretta Scott King, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., speaks during an event to mark the 40th anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream" speech outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. About a thousand people gathered in front of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the spot King delivered the speech four decades ago. (Getty Images / August 23, 2003)

In 1968, as a veiled Coretta Scott King grieved at her husband's funeral in Atlanta, the idea that a national holiday would be created in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s honor seemed remote.

Although King had emerged as the nation's most prominent civil rights leader, he had begun to enrage many of his supporters by speaking out against the Vietnam War. Others criticized him for not embracing a more militant black nationalism. And much of America reviled him as a social agitator for his anti-segregation civil disobedience.

But within weeks of her husband's death, Coretta Scott King began pulling together support for what eventually became the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

"I'm more determined than ever that my husband's dream become a reality," she said shortly after his April 4, 1968, assassination in Memphis.

And 15 years later her efforts persuaded President Ronald Reagan to sign legislation making the third Monday of every January the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday.

After her death at age 78 last Jan. 30 to ovarian cancer, Coretta Scott King was remembered by associates has having carved her own place in history by preserving the legacy of nonviolent social activism that her husband championed.

"She came into her own after Martin passed, in setting the course for the King Center," said Joseph Lowery, who with King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and served on the King Center board. "That is her legacy.

"She also gave impetus to the move to start the holiday," said Lowery, who said her persistent appeals in the early 1980s softened the opposition of congressional Republicans. "They could say no to John Conyers, but it wasn't the same as saying no to King's widow. She was a powerful force in getting that legislation through. She provided the opportunity for politicians to favor it without seeming to favor the agitators."

Daughter of a farmer

She was born in rural Alabama. In his biography of King, author Taylor Branch said her father, Obadiah Scott, was a yeoman farmer who through determination and grit acquired several hundred acres of land, built a fine house, and sent two of his daughters to Antioch College in Ohio.

She was studying voice and violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston when she met King. He was shorter than she cared for initially. But King pursued her after deciding she met four qualifications he sought in a wife: character, intelligence, personality and beauty. The two were married June 18, 1953, despite King's father's stated desire that he marry into one of Atlanta's established black families.

Her marriage thrust her immediately into the most troubling and violent days of the civil rights movement.

In December 1955, a month after the couple's first child was born in Montgomery, Ala., her husband helped organize a boycott of buses there, after local activist Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. A month later, as the boycott dragged on, she and her daughter narrowly escaped injury when someone threw a bomb into the King home.

Myrlie Evers-Williams, whose husband Medgar Evers was murdered in the driveway of their Jackson, Miss., home in 1963, said while she and other spouses of civil rights leaders often urged caution, Coretta Scott King was strongly supportive of her husband's defiance in the face of danger.

"I fought Medgar not to be involved because I was afraid of losing him, as I did," said Evers-Williams, who had been a close friend of King's since attending her husband's funeral. "But she said, 'I always supported Martin.' So without her courage, her vision, her strength, he may not have been as successful as a leader. She was his encouragement."

A widow with four children

Her husband's assassination left King to care for the couple's four young children on her own.

But she did not pause in assuming his cause. She appeared at an anti-war rally in Central Park less than a month after his slaying. And even before her husband was buried, she marched with striking Memphis sanitation workers. King had been in Memphis in support of the strike when he was slain.

That June, she founded the King Center, which serves as his burial site, as well as a repository for his writings and a teaching center for conflict resolution. Squabbling has broken out among her children over control of the center since she stepped down as its head in 1994.

On March 27, 1979, she testified in Congress in support of a national holiday honoring her late husband. Reagan signed the bill into law in 1983.

Now the Kings' four children - Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott and Bernice Albertine - remain to carry on the family's legacy.

In Congress the day she died, House and Senate leaders ordered flags flown at half-staff.

Days later in Atlanta, a two-hour line wound around the gold-domed Georgia Capitol, where 42,000 people walked past her bronze. King was the first woman and first African-American to lie in state at the Capitol.

The coffin was borne through the city on a horse-drawn carriage and arrived at the Capitol as the sun broke through clouds.

At a private ceremony, King's four children spent several minutes at the coffin before the rotunda. Yolanda King stroked the face of her mother, who was adorned in a pink outfit.