Our history is about our accomplishments; our legacy is about our impact.
Pete Luongo
Not too long ago, I served on the panel of a leadership conference in Chicago. The conference conveners asked us to name a person we thought was a great leader and explain why that person was so great. The panelists mentioned many powerful people, and the virtual audience started adding even more names to the chat.
I named Mrs. Coretta Scott King (although we share the same married name, we are not related). She was not just the wife of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the mother of his children; she was a leader and civil rights activist in her own right. I consider her a great leader because she ensured that her leadership legacy would exist long after she was gone. This legacy she carved out and stewarded in the form of the King Center and the King holiday was not just for her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but also for herself. As a Black woman of faith, she envisioned, advocated for, and enacted values of justice and equality for most of her life.
Coretta Scott was born in Heiberger, Alabama, the second of three children to Obadiah and Bernice Scott. Her faith was formed in the AME Zion tradition of the Black church, and it was there that young Coretta’s love for music was birthed. Music was to be her future career and a hallmark of her work in the early civil rights movement.
In 1945, Coretta Scott followed her older sister, Edythe (the first Black person admitted to the school), to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Ultimately, Coretta received a BA in music and education. It was at Antioch, in what she described as a “diverse pro-peace environment,”[1] where she became immersed in a life of justice activism. She later attended Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, where she earned a Bachelor of Music in Music Education. Her musical acumen supported and informed her peace and justice activism.
Coretta Scott met Martin Luther King Jr. while he was in divinity school at Boston University. Ms. Scott was already deeply entrenched in “racial justice politics and the peace movement” — even more so than he was at the time.[2] Many people don’t realize it, but Coretta Scott influenced Martin King’s own civil rights leanings.
Dubbed a partner in social change on the King Center website, Mrs. Scott King devoted her life to “the highest values of human dignity in service to social change.”[3] She was a woman of purpose, and her work was both historical and legacy-building. Mrs. Coretta Scott King founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta, Georgia, to cement Dr. King’s principles of nonviolence, global peace activism, global human rights, and women’s equal rights. The Center continues to do exceptional work in providing critical training in nonviolent resistance. She advocated and built coalitions to make her husband’s birthday a federal holiday – the first federal service holiday in our history.
Mrs. King’s work reminds me that as a Black woman leader, I may not get the accolades for the work I do in support of causes, but I have got to do the work anyway. In her memoir, Mrs. Scott King recounts that “the press overlooked my agenda and activities, which had been deeply pro-peace and antiwar since my days at Antioch.”[4]
Mrs. Scott King was invited to several antiwar campaigns, including a rally protesting the Vietnam War at Madison Square Garden in 1965. She was the only woman and one of two Black people invited to speak. She remained an ardent affiliate with Women Strike for Peace, a group with whom she had traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, on a peace mission in 1962. On March 28, 1968, a little over a week before that fateful day on which her husband would be shot, Mrs. King was in Washington, DC, participating in a press conference with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Faith-fueled Leadership
Mrs. King, along with Dr. King and the entire movement, faced many struggles and suffering in the fight for justice. Mrs. King described their fight as being guided by the “writings of the Apostle Paul and the life of Jesus, [knowing] that Christians are often called by God to participate not only in the victory of the risen Christ, but in His agony and His suffering.”[5] She experienced the deepest anguish when she received news her husband had been assassinated on Thursday, April 4, 1968. Yet, in the spirit and power of her faith and love for the movement, Mrs. King flew to Memphis on the Monday following Dr. King’s murder to lead the march that he had planned to lead. Nearly 50,000 people showed up that day, giving tribute to Dr. King’s life. Mrs. King wrote in her memoir, “I challenged the crowds to make sure that Martin’s spirit never dies, and that we will go on from this experience…toward…the redemption of the Spirit.”[6]
She also wrote that when she spoke that day, some news reports said she was “making her debut as a leader.”[7] That was neither true nor was it her objective. She was already a leader. She shared, “I had a commitment even larger than Martin’s. I wanted to be useful and available to God, and I was praying to God for direction, a way to perfect my life after Martin, and to continue our work and follow the calling we both had cherished. I was separated from Martin now, but never from the movement; never from the Cause.”[8] So, with great resolve, on the day of his funeral, Mrs. King made the commitment to herself, “They may have killed the dreamer, but they will never kill his dream.”[9] Indeed, his dream was also her God-given dream and her leadership focused on keeping their dream alive.
In summarizing Mrs. King’s impact, her own words are most apropos for describing both her historical significance and the legacy with which she has left us, and left me particularly as a Black Christian woman: “Leaders do not ask for the task but are tracked down by the spirit of the times until it consumes them; they reach a point where they become the symbol of the disaffected and the movement swirling around them.”[10] Mrs. King left a legacy of strength, perseverance, and in her own right became a history-making symbol of racial, gender, and economic justice. She has set us a high bar of commitment to this justice, to freedom, and to love.
In 2018, I was blessed to visit the King Center as a part of a Fierce Women of Faith tour in which we retraced the historic Civil Rights era locations and studied the women of the movement. A highlight of the Center was the exhibit, Freedom’s Sisters, dedicated to the often-overlooked women of the movement. Like the founder of the Center, these women shaped much of the “spirit and substance of civil rights in America, just as their mothers and grandmothers had done for decades.”[11]
It is in that spirit that I lift up Mrs. Coretta Scott King this Black history month: for her leadership in shaping the movement of freedom for women and men of all races, creeds, and backgrounds. She truly led according to her faith, and her legacy is one upon which we, today’s Freedom’s Sisters, must build.
Photo by Herman Hiller for New York World-Telegram & Sun on Wikimedia Commons
Notes
[1] Coretta Scott King with Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 24.
[2] Jeanne Theoharis, “‘I Am Not a Symbol, I Am an Activist’: The Untold Story of Coretta Scott King,” Guardian, February 3, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/03/coretta-scott-king-extract.
[3] ”About Mrs. Coretta Scott King,” The King Center, https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/about-mrs-king/.
[4] Coretta Scott King with Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 148.
[5] Coretta Scott King with Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 154.
[6] Coretta Scott King with Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 166.
[7] Coretta Scott King with Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 166.
[8] Coretta Scott King with Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 166.
[9] Coretta Scott King with Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 170.
[10] Coretta Scott King with Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 60.
[11] Freedom’s Sisters Banner, August 8, 2018, photograph, King Center for Nonviolence, Atlanta, GA.
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