Many of us were moved this month by news of the demise of Coretta Scott King, Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous and courageous wife, who at age 78, died a few months after suffering cervical cancer and a stroke. To my knowledge, Coretta, as she was affectionately called, never visited Oak Park. So what’s the local hook?
I spoke about Coretta recently at Brooks Middle School?#34;first in Bruce Harken’s social studies class where my oldest son, Amman, is a student; then in Lauren Robinzine’s language arts class where twin brother, Jordan, is a student. The message in both classes was the same: whether or not Coretta King ever stepped foot in our villages, an argument can be made that her universal story of suffering through Montgomery house bombings and MLK’s assassination is one that locals might identify with. I began by showing students a Brooks Library copy of Profiles in Great African Americans, featuring Dr. King on the cover and a story about how he and Coretta met one another at Boston University, a school where he received his Ph.D. in theology in 1955.
Coretta enrolled at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music with a grant from the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, eventually earning a Mus.B. in voice, according the editors of Black Women in America (Carlson Publishing) who add: “Despite the initial objections of King’s parents who wanted him to marry a woman from his hometown of Atlanta, the two were married at the Scott family home near Marion on June 18, 1953.”
It was Alabama-born Coretta who seemed to have the greatest influence on Dr. King’s decision to move to Montgomery where he later achieved international fame as the leader of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, a pivotal event in the civil rights and women’s rights movement, inspired in part by Rosa Parks’ refusal to give her bus seat up to a white man. I’m sure Coretta was told that even though she and her husband were invited there by local leaders and had lived there for about a year before the boycott officially took off, that it was a “local” issue. It’s widely reported the Kings and other civil rights workers at the time were called “outside agitators.”
There is a local parallel in that some members of the Oak Park community sometimes claim that those of us who challenge the equity and power-sharing issues here are either “outside agitators” or “have not lived here long enough.” Those would be the ones who have forgotten or never heard of the two firebombings each of Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in the ’20s and Percy Julian’s home in the ’50s.
I met Coretta and her four children in Los Angeles more than two decades ago when they received the NAACP Image Award. As a reporter, I spoke to them about the move to name a holiday after her husband, which she liked, but she frowned upon the idea of a possible holiday for Malcolm X, another black human rights leader who was assassinated in the mid-’60s. The children seemed more sympathetic to the Malcolm X holiday idea, especially MLK III. In an earlier interview with me for the Los Angeles Sentinel, I spoke with the oldest daughter, Yolanda, who was a baby during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, about what she called “the government conspiracy to assassinate my daddy because he had taken civil rights to a human rights level by opposing the war”?#34;a point echoed to me in 2000 by youngest daughter, Bernice.
I still wasn’t convinced that students in Mr. Harken’s and Ms. Robinzine’s classes were persuaded that Coretta, a single black mother, had local appeal, so I pressed on. I mentioned that Oak Park’s Fair Housing Ordinance, passed in 1968, would not have occurred, according to interviews with dozens of African-American locals, without Coretta and Martin’s influence on the intersecting local and national civil rights scene.
I understand there were local white and black activists that were equally influential. I respect their work. But to cite only local without including national context is not telling the whole story. On the day Coretta was laid to rest, a white student named “Mac” said a record number of visitors had graced the great lady’s wake. He was correct. I noted that many top children’s books are stamped with the Coretta Scott King Award. The students nodded. I think they got the connection.