The United States lost one of the last titans of the pioneer generation of the civil rights movement on Tuesday with the death of Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr.
King, who was 78, had been in poor health since suffering a stroke last August. She did not attend the annual Martin Luther King holiday celebration in Atlanta two weeks ago. She appeared at an awards dinner with her children, smiling from her wheelchair, but was unable to speak.
Known nearly universally as the first lady of the civil rights movement, she was also one of the last surviving figures from King’s inner circle, and her death was seen on Tuesday as an historic passing.
”It’s a sorrowful day to those of us who knew them, and who worked with them and who tried to promulgate a better life for this country,” the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, another member of that dwindling group, told The Guardian. Shuttlesworth was a co-founder with Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
”She espoused what she and her husband, Martin Luther King, lived for: uplifting of the human race, non-violence in human affairs, love, and so on. What Dr King and his wife lived, or tried to live for, was the best that could happen in any generation.”
John Lewis, organiser of student sit-ins in the civil rights era and now a Democratic congressman from Georgia, told CNN: ”She became the embodiment, or the personification, keeping the mission, the message, the philosophy, the discipline of non-violence in the forefront. And she did everything possible to build a living monument to Dr King.”
Sadness at the loss of King was compounded by the death barely three months ago of Rosa Parks, the black seamstress whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man helped ignite the civil rights movement.
On Tuesday, a steady stream of mourners arrived at the Martin Luther King Jr Centre for Non-Violent Change in Atlanta, where the civil rights leader is buried, to pay their respects. Flags at the centre were flying at half-mast.
While King was alive, his wife played an instrumental role as pastor’s wife and as an activist, building support for the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, and efforts to pass the civil rights act in 1964.
”There is no question that on the subject of physical courage and moral courage that she was Dr King’s equal in every way. So far, there is nothing to suggest that she ever wavered in getting him to take the more aggressive stance he could not only on segregation, but on the Vietnam war,” said Howell Raines, who covered the civil rights movement and went on to become executive editor of the New York Times.
After King’s assassination in 1968 left her a widow with four young children, King became a powerful symbol of her husband’s struggle for peace and equal rights. She was a calm steady presence at seminars and public meetings. She was also the guardian of his legacy, campaigning for more than a decade to have King’s birthday observed as a national holiday.
”She was in a difficult position being the widow of a great American hero, a role that carried high expectations but she did a credible job of continuing Dr King’s dream especially in the face of a changing and often hostile American public,” said Morris Dees, a founder of the Southern Poverty Law Centre in Montgomery.
For the heirs of the civil rights movement, she was an inspirational figure. ”For those of us that were too young to get to know Dr Martin Luther King Jr very well, we got to know Coretta Scott King as a compassionate, caring yet firm matriarch of the movement for justice,” the Reverend Al Sharpton said in a statement. ”She was kind and gentle with impeccable grace and dignity, yet firm and strong and immovable under issues that she and her husband committed their lives to.”
King worked hard to establish the multimillion-dollar Centre for Nonviolent Social Change, which trains people in her husband’s philosophy of non-violence. In 1974, she created a coalition of business, civil, labour and women’s rights groups that campaigned for an equal employment policy.
In 1985, she and three of her children were arrested in an anti-apartheid protest outside the South African embassy in Washington.
Born in Marion, Alabama, Coretta Scott was awarded degrees in music and education from Antioch College, Ohio, and went on to study at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met Martin Luther King Jr, who was pursuing a doctorate. The couple were married in 1953, and the next year moved to Montgomery, where King became pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
She is survived by her four children, Yolanda Denise King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and the Reverend Bernice Albertine King. – Guardian Unlimited Â