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Friday's Labor Folklore
Con Carbon, Minstrel of the Mine Patch
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Coretta Scott King
- Coretta Scott was born on April 27, 1927 in Marion, Alabama in her parents home. Delia Scott - her great-grandmother and a former slave - presided as midwife.
- Coretta graduated valedictorian from Lincoln Normal School in 1945 where she played trumpet and piano, sang in the chorus and participated in school musicals.
- She followed her sister - Edythe - to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. (Edythe was the first African American to attend Antioch.)
- She became politically active, joining the Antioch chapter of the NAACP and the college's Race Relations & Civil Liberties Committee.
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Coretta transferred out of Antioch after winning a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, studying voice. There she met Martin Luther King whom she married in 1953. After completing her degree at the New England Conservatory she moved, with her husband, to Montgomery, Alabama (1954).
- The Kings had four children - Yolanda, Martin III, Dexter and Bernice all who followed their parents' footsteps as civil rights activists.
- On January 30, 1956 - while Martin was speaking at a mass meeting - their house was bombed. The house rocked and fill with smoke but Coretta and Yolanda - their first child - was not harmed.
- In 1962 she served as a delegate to the Women's Strike for Peace Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.
- On April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee supporting the sanitation workers' strike. On April 8th Coretta and her children led a march to the Memphis City Hall, which her husband planned to carry out before his assassination. Later that year she spoke at the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, DC.
- Coretta Scott King continued her life of activism broadening her focus from civil rights to women's rights, LGBT rights, economic justice and world peace. In 1969 she led a demonstration of striking hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina. She spoke out against the Vietnam War and founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. She fought to establish her husband's birthday as a national holiday.
- Coretta published her memoirs and she protested against apartheid in South Africa. She was an early supporter of lesbian and gay rights and she opposed the Iraq War. She received numerous awards, including the prestigious Gandhi Peace Prize of India (2004)
- At the end of her 77th year she experienced health problems and, in 2005, suffered several small strokes.
- Coretta Scott King died on January 30, 2006 in Rosarito Beach, Mexico of complications from ovarian cancer.
(Source:Wikipedia)
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Coretta Scott King
speaks out
against homophobia
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The 2018
Great Labor Arts Exchange
June 21-23rd Tommy Douglas Center
Silver Spring, Md.
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