[Posted Jan. 17, 2008]

Mrs. Coretta Scott King—
Preserver of The King Legacy
 

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

     As one third of the nation takes off from work to celebrate the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin L. King Jr.—while others work—will more people remember his wife, who helped to create the holiday?

Coretta Scott King at her husband's funeral.

      The King holiday—which is still controversial in some sectors of society—actually happened long before Coretta Scott King died in Mexico at age 78 in 2006 from a stroke and a heart attack. It took 15 years to establish her husband’s birthday as the only national holiday that honors an individual American.
     “I don’t think people give her enough credit for doing something very few people have done,” Clayborne Carson, director of the Stanford University King Papers Project, said in an interview shortly before Mrs. King died. “If she hadn’t been as dedicated and energetic as she was, the King Center wouldn’t exist and the King holiday wouldn’t exist.”
      Mrs. King was the wife of a man whose accomplishments included the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. But she was also a loving mother who created a national holiday as well as Atlanta’s MLK Center for Nonviolent Social Change. In short, she was a CEO and a single mother.
     “This speaks of her strength and compassion,” said Hampton Roads scholar Dudley Colbert, who also manages the Norfolk Blyden Branch Library. More people usually check out books on the King family in January.
     “She had the need to be vocal about the injustices that needed to be righted,” Colbert noted. “So you can admire someone like that who seemed to think ‘I’m going the last mile.’ Her efforts were a continuation of her husband’s legacy and what he stood for.”
      So persistence was her enduring legacy, Colbert added. “She was an organizer. She was able to keep the King Center operating and her family together. She had a lot of different skills.”

      To many, Mrs. King was the closest thing possible to African-American royalty, from the regal way she carried herself to how others perceived her. Her image froze in the public’s consciousness, thanks to a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken at her husband’s funeral. Beneath her black veil, she seemed dignified and stoic even as she consoled her grief-stricken 5-year-old daughter, Bernice.

Coretta Scott King

      Yet, she was instrumental in getting the King holiday bill passed, U. S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) said in an August 2006 interview.
“When Martin was assassinated, I called her to get her approval to get the Martin Luther King Holiday bill, because I didn’t want to do it without her knowledge and support and she agreed.”
      Four days after her husband’s death, Conyers submitted his first piece of legislation to commemorate Dr. King’s birthday. Conyers noted, “She was very instrumental in getting the holiday approved. Only she could do that.”
      Although President Ronald Reagan opposed the King holiday on fiscal grounds, arguing that a 10th annual holiday would cost the government about $225 million in lost wages alone for federal workers, he signed it into law Nov. 2. 1983.
      She is overshadowed by neither the King holiday nor her husband, whose accomplishments it was created to honor. Rather she and her husband are overshadowed by the civil rights movement, said Hampton Roads poet and author Nathan Richardson, who recently completed a poem on Mrs. King, comparing her to his own tenacious mother.
     “One thing sticks out in my mind about Mrs. King,” Richardson said. “Discipline. Clearly it took a lot of discipline for her not to stray from doing what society expected her to do after the death of a husband. She’s a woman of incredible discipline.
     “But, we tend not to notice that both Mrs. King and her husband were overshadowed by a movement that was larger than both of them. They sacrificed their whole lives for a better America.” Richardson will help sponsor the Gordon Parks exhibit at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk from Jan. 20 to March. The exhibit will include 50 photos by Parks.
      The exhibit is titled, “Bear Witness.” And free admission will be given to middle and high school students who attend in groups with a teacher. More information is available on the museum’s website.
If Mrs. King is overshadowed by anything, then it is by a holiday that has become too commercialized, Richardson said. “When you commercialize anything, you start to lose its educational or historical value. Now you have a watered down version of what the holiday is all about.
     “I see people grasping for the value of the holiday. They don’t want it to be trivialized. One of the challenges Mrs. King faced is a challenge many women face today,” Richardson said. “ ‘Should a woman stand beside or behind her man, or does she have to make either one of these choices?’ “
Richardson explained. “In other words, many other women also wonder ‘what is my role?’ “ How do you strike the balance between a family and a career? Mrs. King understood.”
      However, her winning formula was not new, said author and Washington University professor Gerald Early, in a 2006 essay on Mrs. King.
     “She used her famous husband, as certain driven women have done before her, to empower herself and, ironically to achieve her identity through the maintenance and propagation of his myth,” Early wrote.
      Early continued, “That she as a black woman was able to build a national shrine for a black man-—one whom many believed was a communist and fewer truly esteem than their public pronouncements might suggest—is a considerable feat of energetic single-mindedness, worthy of admiration.”

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