Life and Deeds of Coretta Scott King - Essay Example

Coretta Scott King had worked most of her life for equal rights and peace among the mass. When she was born, African Americans did not have the equivalent rights as other people. The Scott family was also treated badly because they were African Americans.

The basic identity of Coretta Scott King had been shaped due to racism that she had to encounter in Alabama, in her formative years. She was by then a political activist before her marriage.

She had become a fervent follower of the left-wing Progressive Party while breaching racial barriers at Antioch College as an undergraduate. Coretta Scott King was attracted to her future husband’s idealism after coming to the New England Conservatory, located in Boston to study music. Martin Luther’s rejection of the notion of “making all the money you can and ignoring people’s needs” reinforced her views. They married in 1953 and moved to Alabama, where Dr. King became a preacher at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. All through the 1950s and 1960s, she escorted her husband in his campaign for civil rights.

Coretta King emerged as a public figure primarily after the assassination of her husband. She sought opportunities to express her irrepressible idealism. Coretta Scott King joined ‘Women’s Strike for Peace to the Disarmament Conference’ held in Switzerland, Geneva, during the early 1960s expressing her opposition to the Vietnam War several years before her husband was willing to take a public anti-war stand. Similar to her husband, she too viewed the civil rights struggle in the broader context of anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa, in the United States. She along with her husband attended the independence ceremony of Ghana, i.e. Africa’s first black-ruled nation in 1957. In 1959, the Kings traveled to India, where she sang spiritual songs at events in which her husband spoke. After the family moved to Atlanta in the year 1960, she appealed to John F. Kennedy thereby helping to achieve her husband’s discharge from a Georgia reformatory. Furthermore, in 1964, she attended the ceremony in Norway, Oslo for which Dr. King received Nobel Peace Prize. During the mid-960s, Coretta King’s association with the civil rights movement had augmented because she took part in ‘freedom concerts’ that encompassed singing, poetry recitation, and lectures representing the record of the civil rights movement. The proceeds received were bequeathed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Before 1968, she also maintained speaking about the commitments that her husband could not accomplish.

Coretta, being the founding president of the King Center, not only campaigned assiduously to establish the national King Holiday but also revealed her magnanimous vision of universal peace as well as social righteousness. She had dynamically propagated her husband’s philosophy of nonviolence after his assassination.

She strongly assumed that the death penalty continues the cycle of brutality and shatters all anticipations for a decent civilization. A few days after her husband’s assassination, in Memphis, she led a march on behalf of her husband for sanitation workers. In addition, she also launched the ‘March on Washington of the Poor People’s Campaign’ and participated in innumerable antipoverty efforts. In 1969, she published her memories in ‘My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Coretta King in her later years had increased her advocacy to embrace positions combating women’s as well as LGBT rights. It also included opposition to apartheid as well as world peace in the 1980s. For this purpose, she traveled to Africa when Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner. On April 1998 in Chicago, Coretta Scott asked the civil rights community to join in the fight against anti-gay bias and homophobia. 

Coretta Scott King was simultaneously an activist, civil rights leader as well as an American author. She had significantly contributed to the twentieth-century fights against the Jim Crow system, legalized gender discrimination, colonialism, and South African apartheid that attained basic human rights for most of the masses. She had earned several awards over the years for her commitment to activism. Her significant advocacy as well as political work continued until she died in 2006.