Tag: Coretta Scott King

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Opinion The Last Word

Who Is Coretta Scott King?

Plenty of history books magnify the mission of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was an American champion for the marginalized. While I celebrate his birth each January — and join in remembrance on the anniversary of his April assassination — allow me to shout from the rooftop that the historical impact of his wife, Coretta Scott King, goes largely uncelebrated. As a writer devoted to researching the Civil Rights Movement, I consider America’s lackluster regard for Coretta to be a crying shame.

Coretta’s legacy of social action and promotion of peace deserves to be widely extolled in books and the naming of schools and streets. Without her fortitude, it is likely Dr. King would not have reached his full stature as a civil rights leader. It is also likely that without Coretta’s tireless campaign to establish the King holiday, national and international deference to Martin’s name would be less prominent and shining. If this sounds like an exaggerated assertion, think again.

In 1956 when Dr. King denounced segregation and was a voice for nonviolent protests during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, white segregationists bombed the parsonage where the Kings lived with their firstborn child, Yolanda. While Martin was leading an evening strategy meeting, Coretta and their 10-week-old baby were home when the explosion blasted the front porch to pieces and blew a hole in the living room wall.

No one was injured, but the explosion was a sure reason for Coretta to quit the protest and leave Montgomery for safety. Coretta’s parents, Obadiah and Bernice Scott, lived in Heiberger, Alabama, 80 miles west of Montgomery. Mr. Scott drove to the parsonage expecting to carry his daughter away from danger. Coretta told him, “I am going to stay here with Martin.”

Montgomery was not Coretta’s first encounter with racial terror. When she was a teenager, segregationists set the Scotts’ house on fire. Mr. Scott raised pine timber on the family’s 300 acres. It was the mob’s intention to break his entrepreneurial spirit, but smoldering embers did not make him flinch. He built a new home. Years later, he purchased a lumber mill and segregationists also burned it to ashes.

With faith in a power greater than himself, Coretta’s father stood steadfast in Heiberger to, finally, open a thriving grocery store that served all citizens in Perry County. Just like the song, Obadiah Scott wouldn’t let “nobody” turn him around. He was Coretta’s model of courage. And during the Montgomery bombing, Coretta followed his example. Like her father, she stood unflinching in the face of fire. Coretta then went on to march beside Martin during the Civil Rights Movement from its early days in 1956, until her husband’s assassination on April 4, 1968.

Imagine the outcome if Coretta had abandoned Martin and the movement in Montgomery. If she had fainted in the face of fire, would anyone blame Martin for leaving Montgomery to save his marriage? Absolutely not. But the inward call to pursue freedom in Jim Crow America also weighed heavily in Coretta’s soul. Therefore, Martin never had to choose his family over the movement. And privately, when Martin wanted Coretta to adjourn movement work and be content with motherhood, she reminded him, “I have a call on my life, too.”

During their 13 years marching in the name of civil rights, Martin suffered violence, death threats, and constant trumped-up jail charges. It was Coretta’s disdain for tears, her unwavering words of encouragement, and midnight prayers that helped her husband stay the course. Martin called her “Corrie,” his “brave soldier.”

Few Americans understand the impact of Coretta’s warrior spirit because history books do not adequately explore her life as an activist, leader, and prophetic voice of liberation. Magazines from the ’60s overlooked the bravery in Martin’s warrior woman. Photojournalists rendered her portrait in elegant, unchallenging tones. And from patriarchal pulpits after Dr. King’s murder in Memphis, Black preachers encouraged Coretta to stay pretty and silent, while they jockeyed for positions that once belonged to Martin.

Black male leaders of the movement did not grasp that Coretta was the seed of Obadiah Scott. Burnished by fire, she was incapable of reducing her light. Coretta Scott King followed her own mind. And after Martin’s death, for the next 15 years, she used her voice to promote principles of nonviolence as she rallied the nation to establish a federal holiday to honor Dr. King, a drum major for peace.

As for Martin, Coretta, and the mystery of love, some people believe that marriage is a divine union where two hearts become “one flesh.” If that is true, let me propose a new tradition. Whenever you remember and celebrate the name of Dr. King for his efforts in human rights, be sure to praise and amplify that fated love, who wielded courage to walk as one with him. Her name was Coretta Scott King. She was born April 27, 1927. Martin called her, “Corrie.” She was a woman, wife, and warrior on the battlefield for freedom.

Alice Faye Duncan is a Memphis educator and the author of Coretta’s Journey; Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop; and Yellow Dog Blues, a NYT/NPL Best Illustrated Book selection in 2022. Visit her at alicefayeduncan.com.

*This piece was originally printed in the Dallas Morning News.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

“A Song For Coretta” Sounds Good But the Timing’s Off

At first I blamed the material. And then it hit me: Pearl Cleage’s odd little one act may end with, “This Little Light of Mine,” but A Song For Coretta is a funeral dirge. It presents as the intertwining stories of women standing in line, patiently waiting to pay their last respects to Civil Rights icon, Coretta Scott King. It’s really the allegorical story of voices that have forgotten how to harmonize and of five individual fingers that have forgotten how to make a fist.

For starters, A Song for Coretta isn’t a musical. It’s a play about generation gaps. We meet a proper, older matriarch, full of bootstraps stories, proud to have participated in Civil Rights events with her parents and satisfied with how far her generation has come. King died in 2006, so millennial bashing wasn’t a thing yet, obvs. But the elder is quick to scold anybody younger and ungrateful enough to complain about anything. We’re also introduced to a free-thinking artist and Hurricane Katrina survivor; an ambitious reporter; and a younger, directionless woman from the neighborhood, who’s easy to dismiss but almost impossible to refute.

The secret gag is that this show has very little to do with Coretta Scott King or her husband Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It’s not about the movement and what’s been won or what’s yet to be achieved. It’s about missing pieces. Things like a common purpose and leaders binding everybody together like glue.

A lot’s changed since 2006. Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush in the Oval Office, riding in on a wave of hope and change. He’s since been replaced by the overtly racist Donald Trump. In this time the spirit of protest has rekindled and movements like Black Lives Matter, the Fight for 15, and #TakeEmDown901, have restored at least some  lost momentum. That spirit was just beginning to smolder again to the moment of King’s death, as America was slid into an era of endless war and rapidly expanding income equality. Long story short: There may be plenty left to learn and laugh over in Cleage’s script, but some if its complaints ring at least a little less true today than they might have, even a few years ago. That’s no knock, but something to consider in production design.

Speaking of … Hattiloo’s flat, storybook set is a good-looking charmer, but maybe too much. It’s a shame, at any rate, that so very little of the designed space is ever really used by the actors. And even two weeks into the run, the show’s cast seemed less than confident with blocking and lines. Even the nicest individual performances were incomplete and the relationships never clicked. A Song For Coretta might clip along with all the quirk of an absurdist farce, but in this environment, it limps forward, wounded by an absence of crispness and clarity.

I didn’t think I liked A Song for Coretta till I sat down and wrestled with it for a while. But the more I struggled the more I came to regard it as a special little gem searching for the right setting and a whole lot of polish. Hattiloo solved one of these wants, but not the other. 

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News News Feature

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s not the kind of remembrance people like to attach to those we historically have deemed as heroic martyrs.

A man so disconsolate over what his critics and he himself viewed as abject failure, lying in a Memphis motel room bed, fully clothed, weeping and unable to move for 13 hours. Yet, in his book Death of a King, political commentator and talk-show host, Tavis Smiley, paints a sincere and honest picture of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a man whose human frailties are put to the test in the final year of his life — in a struggle to regain lost prestige, popularity, and his own moral compass.

Beginning with his controversial Riverside Church speech in New York, delivered one year to the day before his assassination in Memphis, King attempted to lay out a new direction for the nonviolent movement he had fostered. With monumental civil rights legislation already on the books, King wanted to expand the scope and participation of the fight against what he saw as the interconnected triad of poverty, racism, and militarism that he felt was tearing away at the fabric of America during the height of the Vietnam War era.

It was an effort to expand on the coalition, which had proven so successful in winning the hearts and minds of those previously drawn to the civil rights movement. But, like others who’ve risen to great heights of leadership on oratory or sheer will, King unwittingly allowed himself to become more insulated from what was going on around him.

Smiley’s book deftly portrays King as a man on a treadmill. No matter how fast he tried to run, everything and everyone in his life was still passing him by, and he couldn’t understand why. He was the same. But, the rest the nation, which he once briefly held in the palm of his hand, had moved on in fractious directions, including his own previous inner circle at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

In Smiley’s book, one of King’s greatest disconnects was with women, and most importantly, his wife, the long-suffering Coretta Scott King. When they first met when both were in their early 20s, King openly admired her not just for her stunning beauty, but also because she became the most strident and unflinching supporter of his nonviolent strategy. Once they started having children, however, King encouraged her to be more subservient, while at the same time he continued his dalliances with other women. So, entrenched in his chauvinistic attitude, King initially rebuked his colleague James Bevel’s suggestion to all male members of the SCLC and other black ministers to tell their wives about their affairs with other women. According to Smiley, King finally did come clean with Mrs. King about one affair, which he told her he put an end to.

I also was drawn to the turbulent final month of King’s life, when it came to how the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike had become a cause celebre’ with him despite warnings from his SCLC inner circle, including apparently Jesse Jackson, that the issues in Memphis were “small potatoes” and not worth getting involved in. But, coming in a year in which he’d been booed off stages, and he was jeered and ridiculed as out of touch with his own people, the reception King received in coming to Memphis was reinvigorating. Memphis had become to him the potential springboard for his still not fleshed out idea of having a “Poor People’s March on Washington.” He viewed it as a golden opportunity to reestablish the nonviolent movement as a viable form of effective protest.

However, as he did through most of that tumultuous final year of his life, King miscalculated, believing the power of his persona alone could bring together divisive factions. The ensuing riot on Beale Street in March of 1968 devastated him enough to seek refuge in a room at the former Rivermont Hotel. King would regroup. His unwavering faith in his mission would allow him to do no less. But, days later, a bullet would be unforgiving.

I applaud Smiley for his determined and compassionate attempt to humanize a man so many authors before have either lionized or demonized. The book provides a lesson, a study in our own mortality. It encourages us to never be so self-assured, so defiant in the face of unwelcomed truth, or so tunnel-visioned about what we believe is right that we ignore the sage counsel of friends and neglect the love and support of family.

For all of us, even the greatest among us, are only mere mortals in the end.