Coretta Scott King can still offer wisdom
These are anxious times, and many seeking solace or direction are reaching back to thinkers and activists of the past, pondering how to move forward. What might Coretta Scott King do? Her new memoir, My Life, My Love, My
Legacy (Henry Holt, 356 pp., out of four), may give us some answers.
In this eloquent, at times painful and ultimately inspirational remembrance, King gives us insights into the forces that shaped her before she ever met her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., and the convictions that guided her long after she lost him to an assassin’s bullet.
Coretta Scott King died in 2006 at 78, and this memoir is based on recordings made with journalist Barbara Reynolds, a former member of USA TODAY’s editorial board. Students of civil rights will know many of the events King recounts; the Montgomery bus boycott, the march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, and of course the assassination of her husband on April 4, 1968.
Still, particularly for a younger generation, it is illuminating to hear the reflections of someone who was not just behind the scenes of history but enmeshed in its most intimate details.
She speaks of how the 1963 March on Washington was pulled together in fewer than 60 days; of how Martin Luther King felt unwell the night before his murder and had planned to skip his visit to the Memphis church where he relayed his prophetic vision of the mountaintop.
She reiterates how black women, pivotal to the movement, were too often denied top leadership positions, and how she encountered resistance from some of her husband’s compatriots at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when she first tried to establish the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta.
King addresses the rumors of MLK’s infidelity and the harass- ment he endured at the hands of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
More fascinating are the details about King herself. You learn that her husband was far from the first man she saw face racist violence with defiance and grace. At age 15, she watched her father rebuild the family home after hostile local whites burned it to the ground, then rebuild again when a lumber mill he dared to open met the same fiery fate. Always, she writes, he emphasized that his children should not hate.
King, a classically trained vocalist who studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, picked cotton as a child. The steadfast partner of Dr. King was a fierce feminist. And she was an outspoken opponent of war long before her husband denounced the conflict in Vietnam.
In a quote to Ebony magazine, King said: “I can’t help but believe that at some time in the nottoo-distant future, there is going to be another movement to change these systemic conditions of poverty, injustice, and violence in people’s lives. That is where we’ve got to go, and it is going to be a struggle.’ ”
And so, in these times, what might she do? King ’s life’s work, relayed in this rich retelling, provides a possible blueprint — and a beacon.
“Our family had suffered so many tragedies,” she writes. But “we had to keep growing, keep building, and keep moving on.”