Coretta Scott King (April 27, 1927 – January 30, 2006) was the wife of the civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., and a noted civil rights leader, author, singer, and founder and former president of the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal and the Gandhi Peace Prize.
Coretta Scott King was the second of three children born to Obediah "Obie" Scott and Bernice McMurray Scott in Perry County, Alabama. She had an older sister named Edythe, born in 1925, and a younger brother named Obediah Leonard, born in 1930. The Scotts owned a farm, which had been in the family since the American Civil War, but were not particularly wealthy. During the Great Depression the Scott children picked cotton with their parents to help support the family.<1> obie was the first black in their neighborhood to own a truck. He had a barber shop in their home. He also owned a lumber mill, which was burned down by jealous white neighbors.
Though uneducated themselves, King's parents intended for all of their children to be educated. King quoted her mother as having said, My children are going to college, even if it means I only have but one dress to put on.”<2> The Scott children attended a one room elementary school five miles from their home and were later bussed to a high school in Marion, Alabama, nine miles from their home. The bus was driven by Bernice Scott, who bussed all the local black teenagers to the Marion high school, as it was the closest black high school.<1>
King graduated valedictorian of Lincoln High School in 1945 and enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Edythe Scott already attended Antioch as part of the Antioch Program for Interracial Education, which recruited non-white students and gave them full scholarships in an attempt to diversify the historically white campus. King said of her first college:
Antioch had envisioned itself as a laboratory in democracy, but had no black students. (Edythe) became the first African American to attend Antioch on a completely integrated basis, and was joined by two other black female students in the fall of 1943. Pioneering is never easy, and all of us who followed my sister at Antioch owe her a great debt of gratitude.<2>
She studied music with Walter Anderson, the first non-white chair of an academic department in a historically white college. King also became politically active, due largely to her experience of racial discrimination by the local school board. The board denied her request to perform two years of required practice teaching at Yellow Springs public schools, for her teaching certificate.<2> In her early life King was as well known as a singer as she was as a civil rights activist, and often incorporated music into her civil rights work.
Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr., were married on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house; the ceremony was performed by King's father. After completing her degree in voice and violin at the New England Conservatory, she moved with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama in September 1954, after he was named pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
The Kings had four children:
Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955- May 15, 2007), Montgomery, Alabama)
Martin Luther III (October 23, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama)
Dexter Scott (January 30, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia)
Bernice Albertine (March 28, 1963, Atlanta, Georgia)
All four children later followed in their parents' footsteps as civil rights activists.
On April 1, 1998 at The Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, King called on the civil rights community to join in the struggle against homophobia and anti-gay bias. "Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood", King stated. "This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group."
In November 2003 in a speech at the opening session of the 13th annual Creating Change Conference, organized by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, King made her now famous appeal linking the Civil Rights Movement to the LGBT agenda: "I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people. ... But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people."
King's support of LGBT rights was strongly criticized by some black pastors. She called her critics "misinformed" and said that Martin Luther King's message to the world was one of equality and inclusion.
In 2003, she invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to take part in observances of the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. It was the first time that an LGBT rights group had been invited to a major event of the African American community.
By the end of her 77th year, King began experiencing health problems. Hospitalized in April 2005, she was diagnosed with a heart condition and was discharged on her 78th and final birthday. Later, King suffered several small strokes. On August 16, 2005, she was hospitalized after suffering a stroke and a mild heart attack. Initially, she was unable to speak or move her right side. She was released from Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta on September 22, 2005, after regaining some of her speech and continued physiotherapy at home. Due to continuing health problems, King cancelled a number of speaking and traveling engagements throughout the remainder of 2005. On January 14, 2006, King made her last public appearance in Atlanta at a dinner honoring her husband's memory.
Death
King died in the late evening of January 30, 2006<9> at a rehabilitation center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, where she was undergoing holistic therapy for her stroke and advanced stage ovarian cancer. The main cause of death is believed to be respiratory failure due to complications from ovarian cancer.<10> King was 78 years old. The clinic at which she passed away was called the Hospital Santa Monica, but was licensed as Clinica Santo Tomas. Newspaper reports indicated that it was not legally licensed to "perform surgery, take X-rays, perform laboratory work or run an internal pharmacy, all of which it was doing." It was also founded, owned, and operated by San Diego resident, and highly controversial alternative medicine figure, Kurt Donsbach.<11><12> Days after Mrs. King's death, the Baja California, Mexico state medical commissioner, Dr. Francisco Vera, shut down the clinic.<13>
Funeral
Over 14,000 people gathered for King's eight-hour funeral at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia on February 7, 2006 where daughter Bernice King, who is an elder at the church, eulogized her mother. The megachurch, whose sanctuary seats 10,000, was better able to handle the expected massive crowds than Ebenezer Baptist Church, of which King was a member since the early 1960s and which was the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral in 1968.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coretta_Scott_King
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