From shotgun shack to civil rights leader and confidante of Martin Luther King
Late one night in May 1964, Dorothy Cotton, who has died aged 88, stood inside a Methodist church and exhorted a crowd of civil rights marchers to take to the streets with love, not hate. A few blocks away, surrounding the central square in St Augustine, Florida, was a crowd of about 100 white men and boys, a group of purported Ku Klux Klan members who carried sticks or makeshift clubs, hiding broom handles down their trouser legs.
‘‘Don’t judge them by the colour of their skin – don’t think of them as white people, but as people with guilt in their souls,’’ said Cotton, one of a handful of women in the top ranks of the
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Amid ongoing debate over the Civil Rights Act in Washington, Cotton led 217 marchers through the streets and past the city’s old slave market, where the demonstrators were met by jeers, howling police dogs and sporadic violence. On that night, according to a subsequent report in the Daytona Beach Evening News, no-one was killed. Cotton then led the group in song when they returned to the church.
‘‘This was about the roughest city we’ve had – 45 straight nights of beatings and intimidation,’’ she later said, recalling the weeks-long protest against segregation. ‘‘In church every night we’d see people sitting there with bandages on. Some would sit with shotguns between their legs . . . We sang before every night we went out to get up our courage . . . After we were attacked we’d come back to the church, and somehow always we’d come back bleeding, and singing.’’
While the male leaders of the SCLC have long been heralded for their work in fighting for racial equality, Cotton played a crucial – if often overlooked – role, leading an education programme credited with teaching thousands of African Americans about their basic rights of citizenship.
She also became one of the closest of King’s confidantes. ‘‘In the last five years of his life, no-one was closer to or more emotionally supportive of Dr King than Dorothy,’’ King biographer David Garrow said.
Dorothy Lee Foreman was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, in the segregated South, and raised in a shotgun shack. She was 3 when her mother died; she and her three sisters were raised by her father.
She had not expected to attend college until a well-connected high school English teacher secured a place for her at Shaw University, a historically black college in North Carolina.
She became a protege of Wyatt Tee Walker, a pastor who was a prominent champion of civil rights in Virginia. When he became executive director of the SCLC in 1960, she followed him to Atlanta and joined the staff. She recalled in 2011 that she promised her Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz husband, George Cotton, her new job would take her away from home for three months. ‘‘But I stayed 23 years,’’ she said. ‘‘The movement became my life.’’ Their marriage ended in divorce.
When she headed the SCLC’s education department, she was the only woman on its executive staff. ‘‘I remember one meeting, Martin said, ‘Dorothy, get me a cup of coffee.’ She said, ‘No, I won’t get you a cup of coffee’,’’ colleague Andrew Young said. ‘‘She was constantly rebelling against the role of being made a second-class citizen. She would tell Dr King no all the time. So I got the coffee.’’
She led monthly workshops in which as many as 60 people studied the US Constitution and African-American history, learned how to read a voting ballot and organise credit unions, and were taught the ins-and-outs of community activism. Individuals who attended the workshops returned home to teach citizenship classes of their own. By the mid-1960s, according to one SCLC estimate, 2600 graduates had led workshops that were ‘‘attended by 23,000 others’’.
With James Bevel, Cotton successfully encouraged King to incorporate young African Americans into their 1963 campaign to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. She became a stabilising force at the SCLC, helping keep the peace between ‘‘highly emotional’’ figures such as Bevel, Hosea Williams, and Jesse Jackson, Garrow said.
‘‘On some occasions, Bevel, Hosea, Jesse could do great things, but they were repeatedly extremely difficult for King to manage. King didn’t like having to deal with difficult situations, and both Dorothy and Andy Young were the real interpersonal glue that held things together and gave King emotional support.’’
She remained with the SCLC for three years after King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. She became a regional director for the federal volunteer agency Action under President Jimmy Carter, and she was vice-president for field operations at the King Centre for Nonviolent Social Change.
Cotton, who leaves no immediate survivors, accompanied King to Oslo when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. It was, she told The Washington Post two decades later, an incredible departure from the marches she had led earlier that year, in St Augustine and Alabama.
‘‘I remember being overcome and crying in the ceremony, all dressed up in my new rosecoloured satin suit. Dr King made his Nobel speech, and they played the music from Porgy and Bess, and I just cried. And I realised the reason I was so overcome was that just days before we had been in Birmingham in our demonstration clothes with the dogs and fire hoses. And there we were in Oslo, wined and dined by the queen.’’ – Washington Post