Sweet Queen Coretta 👑
Sweet king Martin, sweet queen Coretta
Sweet brother Malcolm, sweet queen Betty
Sweet Mother Mary, sweet father Joseph
Sweet Jesus, we made it in America
We would not celebrate MLK Day were it not for Coretta Scott.
According to Bernice King (their daughter), male leaders in the civil rights movement told Coretta to stay home while they continued the work.
But Coretta was a peace advocate and activist before she met Martin. She became the architect of his legacy and criticized the movement’s exclusion of women. Just months after King’s assassination, she founded the King Center—which is both a memorial and nonviolence training center—and lobbied for a federal holiday to honor him. It was an uphill battle. In 1983, when the battle for a holiday came to the Senate floor, Senator Jesse Helms publicly denounced Dr. King as a Marxist.
When asked if his attack on King would affect his reelection campaign, he was both apathetic and unapologetic: “I'm not going to get any black votes, period.” (source)
Helms' remarks elicited a scathing reaction from Ted Kennedy. President Reagan signed the measure (despite initially opposing it).
Coretta fought for Martin’s legacy in spite of the fact that he was widely known to have had multiple affairs (something that must have been especially humiliating to her given his stature as a moral beacon). And despite his fame, they were very poor—Dr. King gave away his Nobel Peace Prize money, careful to not profit from his work. Coretta raised four children alone, in poverty, with incessant death threats.
To this day, both Alabama and Arkansas combine MLK Day with a celebration of Robert E. Lee, and in Virginia, Stonewall Jackson is honored with a parade the weekend before.
One last little-known fact: just because a date is recognized as a federal holiday doesn’t mean it’s observed as a state holiday. And one of the last states to officially observe MLK Day? Utah.
From the Tribune:
Utah lawmakers were discussing a bill to make a state holiday at the same time the first federal MLK Day approached in 1986. The fact that it wasn’t a state holiday back then had mixed reactions. For example, the Utah Daily Chronicle editorial team blasted Utah legislatures in a Jan. 20, 1986, edition of the paper.
A few weeks after that editorial ran, the Utah Senate failed to make it a state holiday in a vote in front of King’s widow, Coretta Scott King.
She was a woman of incomprehensible grace and dignity. She understood her calling, her power, and her place in time. If you’d like to learn more about Coretta, here’s an article I loved: What Coretta Scott King Would Tell Us Now. You can also read Desert Rose—a biography written by her sister, Edythe Scott Bagley, who herself was the first black student at Antioch College in 1943.
Thanks for reading Gemini Mind! Elsewhere, you can find me as @yokizzi 💫