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344 Coretta Scott King (1927–2006) Legacy to Civil Rights Glenn T. Eskew    World renowned for her human rights activities during and after the modern civil rights struggle, Coretta Scott King created a lasting legacy by establishing the process through which the nonviolent movement is memorialized in annual ceremonies, monuments, and institutes. Her vision resulted in the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and the King national holiday observed every January in the United States. More than anyone else, Coretta Scott King deserves credit for the memorialization of the movement that propagates a new ideology of tolerance in America. Her tireless devotion to the cause of social justice as symbolized in the life of her martyred husband resulted in the first official civil rights commemoration and codified the ritual whereby nonviolence would be recalled through ceremonies celebrating diversity in America. Coretta Scott King’s upbringing, the training she received as a student, her role as wife and mother, and her activities on behalf of social justice before the death of her husband prepared her for the leadership role she played after 1968 promoting nonviolent social change at home and abroad. A native of Heiburger, Alabama, Coretta grew up in the Black Belt, where plantation owners and small farmers raised cotton. In the two-room house of Obadiah Scott, his wife, Bernice McMurry, gave birth to Coretta on April 27, 1927. The newborn joined an older sister, Edythe, and then a younger brother, Obie, as the couple’s only children. On the farm, the family raised foodstuffs, from vegetables to livestock, and the cash crop cotton, which Coretta learned to chop and pick, helping neighbors during the fall harvest for extra money to pay for school. She was surrounded by extended family who farmed and timbered, African Americans who were independent landowners. Coretta Scott King 345 As members of Mount Tabor African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the paternal Scott and maternal McMurry families exposed Coretta to a traditional culture of Protestant religion she embraced. In her youth she looked forward to attending church services on Sundays as a weekly social occasion, and the experience instilled in her a genuine religious conviction. At great sacrifice the Scott family paid the tuition for the children to attend good schools, for Coretta’s mother advised: “You get an education and try to be somebody. Then you won’t have to be kicked around by anybody and you won’t have to depend on anyone for your livelihood—not even on a man.” When Coretta was old enough she joined her sister at Lincoln High School in Marion. Founded by freed slaves in 1867 and supported by the northern American Missionary Association, Lincoln boasted of an integrated faculty—half black and half white—that taught a rigorous curriculum of college prep courses. Of the white teachers, all but one came from the North. They lived in integrated housing, which local white people in the Black Belt town found scandalous, despising them as “radicals and ‘nigger lovers’” according to Coretta, who saw them as “brave and dedicated.” The music teacher recognized the quality of Coretta’s singing and gave her voice lessons. The musical programs at Lincoln provided a model Coretta Scott King used in her Freedom Concerts of prose and song performed years later to raise money for the movement. At Lincoln she experienced the “beloved community” later described by her future husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lincoln High School arranged for its chorus to tour colleges in the Midwest , thereby introducing the Scott girls to educational opportunities outside the South. Sister Edythe integrated Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Coretta followed in 1945. Founded by the great educator Horace Mann, the liberal arts institution encouraged students to “be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Coretta Scott took the words to heart. As one of the only African Americans at Antioch, she dealt with the difficulties of desegregating society while developing an “understanding of [her] own personal worth” achieved through the college’s program based “on the total development of the individual.” As she recalled, “Antioch’s pioneering, experimental approach to educational problems reaffirmed my belief that individuals as well as society could move toward the democratic ideal of brotherhood.” Attending Antioch during World War II, Coretta Scott met people who, through their own witness for social justice, awoke in her a human consciousness that steadily expanded to the universal. She supported conscientious...

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