Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing

Coretta Scott King, known first as the wife of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then as his widow, then as an avid proselytizer for his vision of racial peace and nonviolent social change, died early on Jan. 30, 2006 at Santa Monica Hospital, in Baja California, Mexico, near San Diego. She was 78. “She was a woman born to struggle,” Mr. Young said, “and she has struggled and she has overcome.”

Mrs. King was born into rural poverty in Heiberger, Alabama. She became an international symbol of the civil rights revolution of the 1960’s. Correta Scott King continued to be a tireless advocate for social and political issues ranging from women’s rights to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa that followed in its wake, and an outspoken defender of the rights of lesbian and gay people.

In 1952, before she came to national prominence, Correta studied music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. There she met a young graduate student in philosophy. On their first date, Martin told her: “The four things that I look for in a wife are character, personality, intelligence and beauty. And you have them all.” In one year she and Dr. King, then a young minister from a prominent Atlanta family, were married. Their partnership ended with Martin’s assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

Even before her husband was buried, Correta Scott King took her place at the head of the striking garbage workers that Martin had come to Memphis to promote. She went on to lead the long and hard campaign for a national holi-day in Martin’s honor and to found the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change.

She did all this having been left to raise their four young children alone. Mrs. King faced trials and controversies. Some in the movement thought her chilly and aloof. There was even intra-family tension over where the greater focus ought to be, either on Dr. King’s legacy or on continuing his work. Another controversy within the movement was her outspoken support of gay rights. She said, “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.’ I appeal to everyone who believes in Mar-tin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.”

Mrs. King came a long way from the time and place of her birth. Coretta Scott born April 27, 1927, was the second of three children born to Obadiah and Bernice Scott. Her father built their two-room house on land that had been owned by the family for three generations. Hers was a poor family. She grew up picking cotton in the hot fields of the segregated South or doing housework. But her father, Mr. Scott, hauled timber, owned a country store and worked as a barber. Her mother drove a school bus, and the whole family helped raise hogs, cows, chickens and vegetables. So by the standards of blacks in Alabama at the time, the family had both resources and ambitions out of the reach of most others.

Still, early on, Coretta Scott saw and felt the injustice of segregation as she walked to her one-room schoolhouse each day. She could see buses with the white children on their way to school stirring up dust as they drove by. But Coretta Scott was a good student and she was able to attended the Lincoln School, a private missionary institution in nearby Marion. She studied piano and voice and encountered teachers who were college-educated. She resolved to leave the rural world of segregated Alabama and, in 1945, she graduated first in her class.

From there she was able to go to Antioch College in Yellow Springs. She studied education and music. When she graduated, she went to the New England Conservatory of Music planning to become a classical singer. She had to work as a mail order clerk and clean houses to pay her bills. Correta was a strong young woman. She stunned Dr. King’s father, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. when talking about their wedding she insisted that the part about promising to obey your husband had to be removed. Reluctantly, Martin’s father went along with her wishes.

They soon had four young children, Yolanda, born in 1955; Martin III in 1957; Dexter in 1961, and Bernice in 1963. At the time, men dominated the Civil Rights Movement. There was difference of opinion between Martin and Cor-etta about her role. She definitely wanted to be there for their children, but she had also always wanted to be active in the movement.

After Martin’s death, she said, “Martin was a very strong person, and in many ways had very traditional ideas about women,” (The New York Times Magazine in 1982). “He’d say, ‘I have no choice, I have to do this, but you haven’t been called.’ ” “And I said: ‘Can’t you understand? You know I have an urge to serve just like you have.’” She was able to make a place for herself through her involvement in thirty plus “Freedom Concerts.” In those, she lectured, read poetry and sang. She did this to help promote greater awareness of the civil rights movement, and of course to raise money.

Martin, of course, knew this about her. In an interview he said, “I wish I could say, to satisfy my masculine ego, that I led her down this path,” (1967) “But I must say we went down together, because she was as actively involved and concerned when we met as she is now.” Still, more often, Mrs. King was seen as an inspirational figure around the world, a tireless advocate for her husband’s causes and a woman of enormous spiritual depth who came to personify the ideals Dr. King fought for.

“She’ll be remembered as a strong woman whose grace and dignity held up the image of her husband as a man of peace, of racial justice, of fairness,” said the Reverend Joseph Lowery, who helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King and then served as its president for 20 years. “I don’t know that she was a civil rights leader in the truest sense, but she became a civil rights figure and a civil rights icon because of what she came to represent.”