One of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous speeches was his April 4, 1967, condemnation of the Vietnam War. He said America could never end poverty at home as long as "adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube."

King confessed in his speech that it took him two years to "break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart." A prior, 1965 declaration that "the war in Vietnam should be stopped" resulted in a massive backlash from the White House and other black civil rights leaders who were afraid that an angry President Lyndon B. Johnson would dump them.

In the shadows of history, Coretta Scott King, who died yesterday at age 78, stoked her husband's fire until the blaze could not be contained. She was active in the global peace movement before her husband. In 1962, she traveled with an American delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, to monitor nuclear test-ban talks. In her 1969 autobiography, she said the delegation was received by the US representative to the talks as if they were "hysterical females."

Coretta Scott King joined the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. After her husband received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, she said she told him many times, "I think there is a role you must play in achieving world peace, and I will be so glad when the time comes when you can assume that role."

A symbol of how her husband was not quite ready to assume that role came late in 1965. King, burned by the backlash of his first attempts to criticize the war, backed out of an address to a peace rally in Washington. His wife kept her commitment to speak, saying, according to Taylor Branch's new book "At Canaan's Edge," that America had to stay true to the ideals of democracy "in spite of the bombings in Alabama as well as in Vietnam."

King built the case for his 1967 speech, raising the temperature a few additional degrees with each new speech. By the beginning of that year, he said, "The promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam." But even though the April speech came with deliberate speed, he was again criticized by civil rights giants Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Ralph Bunch, and Jackie Robinson and panned by The New York  Times, Newsweek, and Life.

Coretta Scott King kept stoking the fire. She said she told her friends, "Those persons who do not agree with my husband now do not understand the meaning of his whole life. You cannot believe in peace at home and not believe in international peace. He could not be a  true follower of the nonviolent philosophy and condone war. You think of him as a politician, but he feels that as a minister he has a prophetic role and must speak out against the evils of society. He sees war as an evil and therefore he must condemn war.
 

"I also pointed out that Pope Paul had recently visited this country and spoken against war and my husband was really saying the same things. When the pope spoke, everyone applauded; but when a black man named Martin Luther King speaks, they criticize him. After all, Martin Luther King is a clergyman too, and taking the world as a whole."

A week after his April speech, King spoke at a massive peace rally in New York City while his wife addressed an antiwar throng in San Francisco. As she was ahead of him on world peace, he was still ahead of the nation on Vietnam. After he was killed a year later, she remained ahead of her time in memorable ways.

In the late 1990s, well before the gay marriage debate caught fire, Coretta Scott King said on the eve of the 30th anniversary of her husband's assassination, "I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"

In the months leading up to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Coretta Scott King was one of the voices who opposed it, warning, "A war with Iraq will increase anti-American sentiment, create more terrorists, and drain as much as 200 billion taxpayer dollars, which
should be invested in human development here in America."

Long after her husband's death, she kept speaking from the burnings of her own heart.

A Legacy of Her Own: Coretta Scott King

The Fellowship of Reconciliation.
communications@forusa.org
 

Coretta Scott King, who died last night at the age of 78, is best known as the driving force behind the memorialization of her late husband, slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. She was the chief architect of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, and was instrumental in getting a federal holiday to honor him.

But Mrs. King was not just the guardian of her husband's legacy. She was a committed activist in her own right, a forceful, courageous, and visionary woman who was determined not just that her husband's achievements be remembered, but that his philosophy of nonviolence continue to be taught.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation, of which Mrs. King was a member, honors the woman who always maintained, despite efforts to tone down the radical implications of Dr. King's message, that the root cause of misery in the world was the "triple evil" of racism, poverty, and violence. She once said of the Fellowship that its "courageous dedication to the liberation of humanity" from these three evils was what put FOR "in the forefront of the nonviolent struggle for peace with justice."

Mrs. King's strength and resolve were apparent early in her life. She was only the second black person in history to attend Antioch College in Ohio - the first being her sister. "That took courage and character," said Lili Baxter, who worked at the King Center and is a past chair of FOR's National Council. "But it also took a vision that people of different races could live and work together."

Her deep and steadfast commitment to nonviolence, in the face of some efforts to downplay its importance, led her to resist the original name proposed for the 1968 center established in honor of Mrs. King's husband: The King Center for Social Change. She insisted on the insertion of the word "nonviolent" in the official title.

She spearheaded a national petition campaign for a federal holiday to honor her late husband - achieved in 1983. Richard Deats, former editor of Fellowship magazine and Martin Luther King biographer, served with her on the commission that brought this about.  "The hallmarks of her leadership were unfailing grace, good humor, and a firm resolve," he said. "She never wavered in her nonviolent vision."

Indeed, who will ever forget Mrs. King's consummate dignity and graciousness, even in the midst of conflict or controversy?  "She was a composed, accomplished, and deliberative person," said Lili Baxter. "But in private, she could also be funny, irreverent, and a shrewd mimic."

Like her husband, Coretta Scott King was a visionary. The most fitting tribute we can make to her is to lift up that prophetic vision of the Beloved Community - a vision for which her husband died, and which she ensured would not be lost.

Biography: Coretta Scott King
Pioneer of Civil Rights

Coretta Scott King Date of birth: April 27, 1927
Coretta Scott King Date of death: January 30, 2006

Coretta Scott was born in Heiberger, Alabama and raised on the farm of her parents Bernice McMurry Scott, and Obadiah Scott, in Perry County, Alabama. She was exposed at an early age to the injustices of life in a segregated society. She walked five miles a day to attend the one-room Crossroad School in Marion, Alabama, while the white students rode buses to an all-white school closer by. Young Coretta excelled at her studies, particularly music, and was valedictorian of her graduating class at Lincoln High School.

She graduated in 1945 and received a scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. As an undergraduate, she took an active interest in the nascent civil rights movement; she joined the Antioch chapter of the NAACP, and the college's Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees. She graduated from Antioch with a B.A. in music and education and won a scholarship to study concert singing at New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.

In Boston she met a young theology student, Martin Luther King, Jr., and her life was changed forever. They were married on June 18, 1953, in a ceremony conducted by the groom's father, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. Coretta Scott King completed her degree in voice and violin at the New England Conservatory and the young couple moved in September 1954 to Montgomery, Alabama, where Martin Luther King Jr. had accepted an appointment as Pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

They were soon caught up in the dramatic events that triggered the modern civil rights movement. When Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white passenger, she was arrested for violating the city's ordinances giving white passengers preferential treatment in public conveyances. The black citizens of Montgomery organized immediately in defense of Mrs. Parks, and under Martin Luther King's leadership organized a boycott of the city's buses. The Montgomery bus boycott drew the attention of the world to the continued injustice of segregation in the United States, and led to court decisions striking down all local ordinances separating the races in public transit. Dr. King's eloquent advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience soon made him the most recognizable face of the civil rights movement, and he was called on to lead marches in city after city, with Mrs. King at his side, inspiring the citizens, black and white, to defy the segregation laws.

The visibility of Dr. King's leadership attracted fierce opposition from the supporters of institutionalized racism. In 1956, white supremacists bombed the King family home in Montgomery. Mrs. King and the couple's first child narrowly escaped injury. The Kings had four children in all: Yolanda Denise; Martin Luther, III; Dexter Scott; and Bernice Albertine. Although the demands of raising a family had caused Mrs. King to retire from singing, she found another way to put her musical background to the service of the cause. She conceived and performed a series of critically acclaimed Freedom Concerts, combining poetry, narration and music to tell the story of the Civil Rights movement. Over the next few years, Mrs. King staged Freedom Concerts in some of America's most distinguished concert venues, as fundraisers for the organization her husband had founded, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Dr. King's fame spread beyond the United States, and he was increasingly seen not only as a leader of the American civil rights movement, but as the symbol of an international struggle for human liberation from racism, colonialism and all forms of oppression and discrimination. In 1957, Dr. King and Mrs. King journeyed to Africa to celebrate the independence of Ghana. In 1959, they made a pilgrimage to India to honor the memory of Mahatma Gandhi, whose philosophy of nonviolence had inspired them. Dr. King's leadership of the movement for human rights was recognized on the international stage when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. In 1964, Mrs. King accompanied her husband when he traveled to Oslo, Norway to accept the Prize.

In the 1960s, Dr. King broadened his message and his activism to embrace causes of international peace and economic justice. Mrs. King found herself in increasing demand as a public speaker. She became the first woman to deliver the Class Day address at Harvard, and the first woman to preach at a statutory service at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. She served as a Women's Strike for Peace delegate to the 17-nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1962. Mrs. King became a liaison to international peace and justice organizations even before Dr. King took a public stand in 1967 against United States intervention in the Vietnam War.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Channeling her grief, Mrs. King concentrated her energies on fulfilling her husband's work by building The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change as a living memorial to her husband's life and dream. Years of planning, fundraising and lobbying, lay ahead, but Mrs. King would not be deterred, nor did she neglect direct involvement in the causes her husband had championed. In 1969 , Coretta Scott King published the first volume of her autobiography, My Life with Martin Luther King Jr. In the 1970s, Mrs. King maintained her husband's commitment to the cause of economic justice. In 1974 she formed the Full Employment Action Council, a broad coalition of over 100 religious, labor, business, civil and women's rights organizations dedicated to a national policy of full employment and equal economic opportunity; Mrs. King served as Co-Chair of the Council.