[Each year for
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I share a special post on better remembering the
many layers of one of our most important and inspiring figures and voices. This
week I’ve followed it up with a series AmericanStudying some of King’s
colleagues in the Civil Rights Movement. Add your thoughts on King, the
movement, or any related histories and issues for a crowd-sourced civil rights
post, please!]
On why and how
we should better remember King’s partner, in life and in activism.
In a January
1966 interview with New Lady magazine,
Coretta Scott King argued that the stories of the Civil Rights Movement had far
too often left out its female participants. “Not enough attention has been
focused on the roles played by women in the struggle,” she noted. “By and
large, men have formed the leadership in the civil rights struggle but women
have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement.” As I have written
elsewhere in this space, even the one woman consistently present in our
collective memories of Civil Rights, Rosa Parks, has been generally turned into
nothing more than an exhausted working woman, rather than the longtime activist
and leader she was. So I agree entirely with Coretta Scott King, believe that
the problem hasn’t really been addressed in the half-century since her
interview, and would argue that she herself represents a perfect opportunity for
us to better engage with women in the Civil Rights Movement.
For one thing, Scott King was there
with her husband at every stage of his activism and leadership, complementing
his efforts with her own. When she married King in 1953 she gave up a promising
career in music performance and education (she was on a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of
Music when the two met in early 1952), but in so doing also continued along
an activist path that was well underway by that time: while at Ohio’s Antioch
College she had joined both the college chapter of the NAACP and its Race
Relations and Civil Liberties Committee, and had petitioned the administration
to grant her a teaching placement in a local school despite a discriminatory
denial. After their marriage, despite bearing and raising four children in
eight years (from Yolanda in 1955 to Bernice in 1963, with Martin III and
Dexter in between), Scott King worked alongside her husband in his evolving
career, not only accompanying him to marches and protests in Montgomery and
Selma but also doing her own consistent
advocacy for Civil Rights legislation.
For another and
even more inspiring thing, after her husband’s 1968 assassination Scott
King continued and expanded his efforts and legacy, all while raising their
four children on her own. In the years immediately following the assassination,
for example, she both published her memoirs, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1969) and founded the Martin Luther
King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, a pioneering institution for
which she served as president and CEO for many years. Over the next few
decades, so brought her activist perspective to bear on a number of other
issues, from helping lead an anti-apartheid
protest outside the South African embassy in 1985 to chairing a 1995 effort
to register one million African American women voters ahead of the following
year’s elections. Because of the tragic killings of King and Malcolm X, it can
feel difficult to connect Civil Rights leaders to the events and issues of
subsequent decades—but like another prominent female Civil Rights activist on
whom I focused in yesterday’s post, Yuri Kochiyama, Coretta Scott King
illustrates how fully the 50s and 60s efforts continued and expanded in the
years beyond. Just one more reason to better remember her life and work!
Next King
colleague tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Civil Rights figures or responses you’d share?
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