Coretta Scott King

From dKosopedia

Category: Georgia Democrats

Coretta Scott King, civil rights leader, passed away in her sleep on January 31, 2006, the age of 78. She was a tireless advocate of civil rights and nonviolent protest. Mrs. King had a grace and an outward serenity that masked a steel core and a deep faith in justice and individual libterties. She carried on the work of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., after his assasination on April 4, 1968. Although the family was left with little money, she raised her four children alone after his death, and she founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, on a farm in Heiberger, Ala. The young Coretta, and her brother and sister, all had to pick cotton during the Depression to help the family make ends meet. Her father was an entrepreneurial man who became the first black man is his area to own a truck. Meanwhile, her mother saw to the children's education, and hired a bus to take black children to the local high school. Coretta graduated at the top of her class in 1945, and she went on to study music at Antioch College in Ohio.

Coretta Scott was a talented singer, and she was studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music when a friend introduced her to Martin Luther King, a young Baptist minister working toward a Ph.D. at Boston University. They were married on June 18, 1953, and moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. King began the historic bus boycott in 1955.