“Always More Than a Label”: 8 Ways to Be Like King for the Struggle Today—Coretta Scott King, That Is
Jeanne Theoharis
Two years ago, recordings released during actor Jonathan Majors’ domestic violence trial sparked controversy when he was heard scolding his ex-girlfriend to be more like Coretta Scott King.
Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Majors, I thought.
Coretta Scott King was a fierce, relentless freedom fighter all her life — and these politics were key to why Martin Luther King Jr. fell in love with her. Yet, time and again, Scott King said she was “made to sound like an attachment to a vacuum cleaner, the wife of Martin, then the widow of Martin. … But I was never just a wife, nor a widow. I was always more than a label.”
Indeed, on this King Day and in these dark times, it’s time to look to this King, as Martin Luther King himself did, for inspiration and steadfastness, to show us the road forward. Below are eight ways to be like Coretta Scott King for all of us in struggle today.
1 Stress the connections between racism, poverty and militarism — even if you’re red-baited.
Growing up in a proud, political family outside Marion, Ala., Coretta Scott and her older sister Edythe were among the first Black students to attend the liberal Antioch College in Ohio in decades. There, she was introduced to the Progressive Party by some of her professors and supported Henry Wallace’s third-party campaign for president in 1948. Wallace challenged incumbent Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey from the left around issues of segregation, economic justice and Cold War militarism.
Scott attended the Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia, in July 1948, as a student delegate, one of about 150 Black delegates out of more than 3,000. She heard political activist-author Shirley Graham (who married W.E.B. Du Bois in 1951) deliver a powerful keynote speech denouncing war. And through her work with the Progressive Party, Scott met both Bayard Rustin and Paul Robeson.
The Progressive Party’s interracial antiracism and global vision were attacked as potentially Communist. So, long before she met Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott was already homing in on the triple evils of racism, poverty and militarism (a framework we typically associate with Dr. King in the last year of his life) and used to standing up against the red-baiting of civil rights activism.
2 Speak truth to power, even as a student.
Coretta Scott majored in education, and that meant she had to student-teach. But Antioch College sided with the Yellow Springs school board, which refused to allow any Black person to student-teach in the local schools. Instead, the college wanted her to student-teach at a segregated Black school in Xenia, Ohio. She refused, and she wrote a searing indictment of American racism to Antioch:
“My precious time and money have been spent for a commodity which I never received only because my skin color happened to be darker,” Coretta Scott wrote. “Do you then wonder why America as a leader among the nations in the world cannot command more respect among the common people who make up the majority of the world?”
She also attempted to rally her white classmates, who were protesting around a number of other issues, to challenge the college’s decision. They refused, worried that their own opportunities would be impacted. So, on her own, she took her case to Antioch’s president, but he also refused to do anything.
This was a devastating lesson, but a critical one for all of us in these times, especially students who have been facing intensified repression: Allies often grew wobbly in challenging racism and power when it happens directly around them. But that must not deter us.
3 Build a romantic partnership that is also an intellectual and political partnership.
Coretta Scott was more of an activist than King when they met in 1952, and they talked about racism and capitalism on their first date. He was smitten. He’d never met a woman like her. According to his sister Christine, Martin liked how self-assured and unapologetically Black Coretta was. She was drawn to his vision, and how he listened. He wasn’t judgy.
As they continued dating, they talked about her disillusionment with the narrowness of the church. He “didn’t criticize me,” she would say. In many ways, Coretta Scott was living the radical Christianity that King had also sought. “I had realized,” she said, “that carrying all the forms out did not make you religious. What you did in your life … really mattered.”
Thus, key to their emerging love was this shared political-intellectual companionship and religious calling to justice. When they married in June 1953, she didn’t wear white and insisted her imposing father-in-law take the word “obey” out of their vows because it made her feel “like an indentured servant.”
4 Be steadfast and unflinching.
In 1954, the Kings moved to Montgomery, Ala., for Martin to pastor his first church. About a year later, they had their first child — and two weeks after that, longtime activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and the Women’s Political Council called a boycott. King was thrust into a leadership role, in part because he was willing to speak at the initial mass meeting when other ministers were too scared. Eight weeks into the Montgomery bus boycott, the Kings’ home was bombed. Both Coretta and 10-week-old Yolanda were home. Hearing a thump, she moved fast, succeeding in getting them out unscathed.
Furious and terrified by the news, the fathers of both Martin and Coretta came to Montgomery to tell them to leave immediately — or, at the very least, to get Coretta and Yolanda out of there. The pressure was immense. “I knew I wasn’t going anywhere,” Coretta later explained. The next morning, at breakfast, Martin was grateful, and told her: “You were the only one who stood with me.”
Had Coretta flinched, the trajectory of the bus boycott and Martin’s leadership — and the burgeoning civil rights movement — would have been very different. She stood fast time and again. As King himself would note, Coretta had “a calmness that kept me going … and a unique willingness to sacrifice for the [movement’s] continuation.”
5 Be an internationalist
Coretta Scott King was focused on global peace and anti-colonialism, joining the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Montgomery in the 1950s. In 1962, she was part of a Women Strike for Peace (WSP) delegation to a 17-member disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland, to pressure the United States and Soviet Union to sign a nuclear test ban treaty. She told the press: “The rights that we had achieved were meaningless unless there was a world to exercise those rights.” The punishing climate of the Cold War made public peace work exceedingly rare. But Scott King pushed forward. In 1963, she led a march to the United Nations carrying a sign saying “Let’s Make Our Earth a Nuclear Free Zone” and met with the Secretary General U Thant — and then went onto DC for another WSP event.
When King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Scott King saw the award entailing a heightened global responsibility for both of them. She began speaking out publicly against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and she pushed her husband to do so as well. Becoming “the family spokesperson on the peace issues,” she tried unsuccessfully to convince the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to take a stand on Vietnam in 1965. At an SCLC retreat in early 1965, she explained how the war “drains resources from education, housing, health and other badly needed programs,” those gathered, “Why do you think we got the Nobel Prize? … Peace and justice are indivisible.”
In June 1965, Scott King was the only woman to speak before a crowd of more than 18,000 at the “Emergency Rally on Vietnam” in Madison Square Garden. In November, she addressed another a peace rally in Washington, D.C., where 25,000 had gathered to protest the war.
“Unless America learns to respect the right to freedom and justice for all, then the very things which we hold dear in this country will wither away in the hypocritical ritual of the preservation of national self-interest,” she told the crowd. Following her appearance, a reporter asked King if he had educated his wife on these issues. “She educated me,” King made clear. Scott King was not only leading her husband on this issue — whose historic Riverside Church antiwar speech came April 4, 1967 — but also leading the nation.
6 Keep going, even as you face tremendous setbacks and tragedies. Double down on your work in the struggle.
“I tried to face them,” Scott King would say of the dangers and tragedies. “I didn’t try to run away from them.”
When her husband was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Scott King was left to raise four young children on her own. But her politics didn’t waver. Martin Luther King had been working to build a Poor People’s Campaign to descend on Washington, D.C., and engage in massive civil disobedience to force Congress and the president into action. But it was Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy and a host of antipoverty activists across the country who took up the task of making the campaign a reality. Four weeks after King’s death, Scott King launched the Southern caravan of the Poor People’s Campaign from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, declaring her own dream: “Where not some but all of God’s children have food, where not some but all of God’s children have decent housing, where not some but all of God’s children have a guaranteed annual income in keeping with the principles of liberty and grace.”
Then, at a Mother’s Day march about a week later with some 7,000 welfare recipients, in Washington, she reminded the nation of its own acts of violence: “Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. … Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence. Even the lack of will power to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.”
The next month, Scott King traveled to Harvard University to give the Class Day address Martin was supposed to have given, decrying the increasing turn to law enforcement: “This is no time for business as usual and strengthening the police is business as usual, a tired and false answer.” Just as war wasn’t a way to solve problems, neither was policing.
7 Show up for everything.
Scott King’s activism did not simply uphold and protect her husband’s legacy, but expanded it. She understood the need for unified Black political power and was a key driving force behind the 1972 Black Political Convention in Gary, Ind. She supported union struggles, like the 1199 Union’s hospital strike in Charleston, S.C., in 1969. She decried welfare cuts as misguided and un-American and fought for a full employment bill and guaranteed annual income for all Americans across the 1970s. She kept a daunting political schedule, building connections between movements and promoting an intersectional vision of economic justice and Black power.
In 1976, Scott King told a friend: “Sometimes I wish I could get at least four hours of sleep a day.” In the 1980s, she took an active role in the anti-apartheid movement, and in the mid-1980s, she was arrested outside the South African embassy. After she traveled to South Africa, she met with President Ronald Reagan to urge divestment.
She continued her international peace work until the end of her life, resolutely opposed to the idea of the United States being “the world’s military policeman.” She opposed the first Gulf War in 1990 and, in the months leading up to the second war on Iraq in 2003, Scott King came out against the invasion. “Peace is not just the goal,” she stressed. “It’s the way.”
8 Fight for LGBTQ rights and take on allies who marginalize women or queer people.
Scott King had pushed back against the civil rights movement’s marginalization of women, most acutely at the March on Washington. She was disturbed that civil rights leaders’ wives didn’t get to march with them, that no woman spoke in the official program, and that no women got to go to the White House afterward to meet with President John F. Kennedy — and told her husband so. In 1966, in an interview with New Lady magazine, she underscored, “By and large, men have formed the leadership in the civil rights struggle but … women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement.”
Scott King also became a vocal advocate of gay rights and a supporter of same-sex marriage, taking on homophobia in the Black community and the nation. In the late 1990s, despite criticisms from other civil rights leaders (including colleagues in the SCLC), she reminded the nation that “Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ ”
She went on: “I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.”
Coretta Scott King saw the struggle for gay rights as intimately and inextricably connected with racial justice, and she stood firm against those who would cast the battle for gay rights as dishonoring the spirit of the civil rights movement. In 1999, she highlighted the threat of AIDS as “one of the most deadly killers of African Americans. And I think anyone who sincerely cares about the future of Black America had better be speaking out.”
She made her husband’s legacy a living practice of social justice.
Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and author of King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South.
