The Study of Racialism

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2942 }

Coretta Scott King dies at 78
By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY
ATLANTA — Coretta Scott King, whose determined activism after her husband's assassination in 1968 helped cement the civil rights movement's commitment to non-violence, has died, her family said Tuesday. She was 78.

One of Coretta Scott King's last public appearances was at the Salute to Greatness Awards Dinner on Jan. 14 in Atlanta, where she got a standing ovation.

Mrs. King had been partially paralyzed after suffering a stroke and heart attack in August 2005. Her last public appearance was Jan. 14, when she received a standing ovation from 1,500 at a dinner celebrating her husband's birthday.

She was the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a role that shaped the rest of her life's accomplishments. She was the First Lady of the civil rights movement, a living symbol of everything it had won. (Photo gallery: Coretta Scott King over the years)

But she was never an idle icon. Mrs. King worked tirelessly to ensure that the nation honor her husband's contribution. She campaigned for years to make his birthday a national holiday. President Reagan signed a bill in 1983 establishing it as a federal holiday, and the nation has observed it since 1986.She founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-violent Social Change here, starting it in the basement of her house. Today, the King Center is a national shrine, visited by more than 650,000 people a year.

For a time after her husband's death, Mrs. King was one of the nation's most respected black voices. In the 1970s, she met with President Carter and the presidents of the Urban League and the NAACP to discuss civil rights. A decade later, she worked in the USA and abroad to end apartheid in South Africa.

The Alabama-born Mrs. King met the young Baptist minister while both were in college in Boston. After he was slain on a motel balcony in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Mrs. King persevered, and she remained true to her husband's ideals, said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist who was with Rev. King in Memphis.

"She was his wife and companion from marriage to death," Jackson said. "They left Boston together (in 1954) and went back to a rural town in the South. Their home was bombed. She survived the bombing. She survived the threats. That gave her a moral authority. A lesser person would have been traumatized and would have surrendered (after the assassination). She simply got stronger, and she never gave it up."

NAACP chairman Julian Bond said it's easy to grasp Mrs. King's impact.

"What is less well understood about her after her husband's death is the way she kept focused on the ideas of non-violence," Bond said. "She never abandoned that. She focused on the use of non-violence as a way to settle human conflicts."

At the White House, Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, told Fox television: "President Bush and first lady Laura Bush were always heartened by their meetings with Mrs. King. What an inspiration to millions of people. President and Mrs. Bush are deeply saddened by today's news."

Mrs. King, a classically-trained opera singer who gave up a promising musical career when she married Rev. King, was the matriarch of a family that was as close to black royalty as America has known. Their children, Yolanda Denise King, 50, Martin Luther King III, 48, Dexter Scott King, 45, and the Rev. Bernice Albertine King, 42, are among her survivors.

"She dealt with the tragedy of the past with dignity and strength and at the same time she met the challenges of the future with courage and vision," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, one of Rev. King's successors as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "She's earned universal admiration."

Today, her husband is one of the nation's most revered figures. His picture hangs in the office suites of powerful business executives and the walls of seedy taprooms. Elementary schoolchildren of all races write essays every year for Martin Luther King Day. She could visit almost any major city in the USA and find a street bearing his name.

Mrs. King was a reminder of what the nation had been — and a symbol of how far it has come. Her husband died dismantling a government-sanctioned system of racial segregation that denied constitutional rights to some Americans because of their skin color.

In the national psyche, Mrs. King belonged to all of that.

A role that grew

Before her husband's death, Mrs. King had a limited role in the civil rights movement. Her husband led marches and demonstrations in cities around the South, starting with the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in 1955. She sang at fundraisers early on and later attended some marches. Mostly, she stayed home — often reluctantly — to raise their four children.

But Mrs. King became active in the peace movement during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, said Taylor Branch, author of a three-book history of the civil rights movement, including this year's At Canaan's Edge and 1988's Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters. (Related: A timeline of Coretta Scott King's life)

"There was a time when Dr. King let her go make speeches he couldn't make" because of a potential backlash against the civil rights movement, Branch said. "She was speaking for outright withdrawal from Vietnam at a time when the well-known anti-war voices were calling for a negotiated settlement."

Rev. King was assassinated in Memphis just before he was to lead a march by striking city garbage workers. James Earl Ray, who confessed to the crime and then recanted, was convicted of the murder. He died in prison of liver failure in 1998 at age 70.Decades after the assassination, many Americans recalled where they were and what they were doing when they learned of his death. They remembered the silence as families gathered around the television for news bulletins. Suddenly, the hopes and dreams Rev. King had inspired seemed dashed; outraged blacks rioted in more than 100 U.S. cities.

The nation saw Mrs. King mourning in indelible black-and-white images from her husband's funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church here. She was proud, beautiful and tragic.

The road to Montgomery

When Coretta Scott met her future husband in Boston in 1952, the South was a place that would seem alien to Americans in 2006.

Blacks and whites did not dine in the same restaurants, sit near each other on buses or trains, or jointly elect their government officials."Whites Only" and "Colored Only" signs marked separate entrances for restaurants and restrooms and hung above water fountains that stood side by side. The segregation laws of the South dictated that black riders on a crowded bus give their seats to white riders who wanted them.

Boston seemed a far more progressive place to Miss Scott and Martin King. She was studying voice on a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music; he was working on a Ph. D. at Boston University.They met through the efforts of a mutual friend. Rev. King had complained to the friend that he wanted to meet "a few girls from down home," according to David L. Lewis' 1970 book King: A Biography. The friend gave him Miss Scott's phone number.

In that first phone conversation, the young King — an established ladies man — laid it on pretty thick. "I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms," he said.

But Miss Scott was no lightweight. "Why, that's absurd," she responded. "You haven't seen me yet."

But he persisted — and won the heart of the young woman he called "Corrie." His father, Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., a powerful Atlanta minister nicknamed "Daddy King," initially objected. He wanted his son to marry an Atlanta girl. But they eventually won him over, and they were wed on June 18, 1953, at the Scott family home near Marion, Ala.

The following year, Rev. King Jr. accepted the job as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. It was there that his life intersected with Rosa Parks in a struggle that would make both of them American icons.

On Dec. 1, 1955, Mrs. Parks, a seamstress at a Montgomery department store, refused to give her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The incident sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, during which blacks stayed off city buses for more than a year. In 1956, the Supreme Court upheld a U.S. District Court finding that Alabama's state and local laws requiring segregation on buses were unconstitutional.The bus boycott propelled Rev. King to international prominence. He emerged as the clear leader of the civil rights movement.

Overcoming fear

Mrs. King's life as his wife would not be tranquil, but she was prepared.

"As we were thrust into the cause, it was my cause, too," she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in January 2005. "I married the man and the cause. I realized I, too, could be killed."

There were harrowing moments:

On Jan. 30, 1956, during the bus boycott, Mrs. King and her two-month-old daughter Yolanda, nicknamed Yoki, were home with a woman from the church when their house was bombed. The dynamite, thrown on the front porch, blew out windows and filled the front room with smoke and glass, but no one was hurt.

In September 1958, Mrs. King flew to New York after her husband was stabbed by a mentally ill woman while signing copies of his new book about the bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom. Doctors removed the sharp blade of a letter opener from near his aorta. If he had so much as sneezed, Rev. King said later, the blade would have punctured his aorta, killing him instantly.

In 1960, Rev. King was arrested at a sit-in Atlanta. When Mrs. King, six months pregnant at the time, learned that her husband was being sent to a state prison, she was disconsolate. Sen. John F. Kennedy, then running for president, called Mrs. King to reassure her.Her husband wrote a letter from his cell asking her to be resolute. "I know this whole experience is very difficult for you to adjust to, but as I said to you yesterday, this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people," King wrote, according to Bearing the Cross, a 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights history by David Garrow. King signed it: "Eternally yours, Martin."

Despite the nature of that closing, allegations of Rev. King's marital infidelities have swirled for years and are detailed in histories of the civil rights movement. Then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who despised Rev. King and believed he was a Communist sympathizer and adulterer, routinely bugged his hotel rooms. In January 1965, the FBI sent Mrs. King a tape containing her husband making bawdy jokes and the sounds of people having sex, according to Bearing the Cross.

In recent decades, Mrs. King was criticized by Garrow for what he saw as her heavy-handed handling of Rev. King's public image, papers and speeches. The King family sold his voice and image to companies such as Cingular Wireless and Alcatel, which used them in advertisements, while denying or limiting access to some researchers and scholars.

"It would be easy to say the decade of embarrassment is primarily the children's fault," Garrow said. "I don't think that would be honest or fair. I think Mrs. King herself increasingly found that running a historical archive was not going to be a profit-making venture. The sense that his legacy ought to be used for maximum income — I think that's something that increasingly stems from her."

Garrow traces Mrs. King's actions to the financial hardships she endured as Rev. King's wife."Much of her behavior of the past 15 years — all the crass or embarrassing commercial uses of his name or image — has its roots in the sense of privation she experienced when he was alive," Garrow said. "Not only did they not have any money, but Doc did not believe in spending money on the family and the household. He would spend money on food, good hotels, good suits, but that was about it."

Despite worries over money and other issues, Mrs. King stood by her husband, well beyond his death.Mrs. King never remarried, and she lived until 2005 in the modest home in Atlanta's Vine City neighborhood that she and Rev. King had bought in 1965.

"That, to my mind, is one of the most important things," Garrow said. "Because that really underscores the extent and intensity of her commitment and attachment to him and his memory."That house was her bond to him, was the link."

Contributing: The Associated Press; Bill Welch

femmedecouleur · Posted: Tue 31 Jan 2006 19:17 Post subject:

Now that was a lady!

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2942 }