Passage III

Coretta Scott King: An Unexpected Turn

As a child, Coretta Scott loved to sing and play the piano. Born in 1927 in Marion, Alabama, the daughter of a successful truck farmer, she became a top student in grade school and was often asked to lead the class in song. Her parents encouraged her to study diligently and responded to her special interests with piano and voice lessons.

[1] After finishing-high school, Coretta Scott attended Antioch College in Ohio. [2] After college, she enrolled in Boston's New England Conservatory of Music, where her studies, she hoped, would lead to a degree in voice and a celebrated concert singer. [3] It was there that her life took an unexpected turn when she met a doctoral student at Boston University's School of Theology, Martin Luther King, Jr. [4] She graduated from Antioch in 1951 with a degree upon finishing a program of study in music and elementary education. (35)

Soon after their marriage in 1953, the Kings moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where the Reverend Dr. King began his first church assignment. Their first child was born in 1955, just three weeks before Dr. King has led the historic Montgomery bus boycott. During these years, Coretta Scott King became a calm, forceful presence, in the civil rights movement. Even as she fulfilled the duties of pastor's wife, she was steady and unwavering. In 1956, after their home was bombed, supporters were told how much his wife's strength had helped him through that incident. (40)

In the mid-sixties, Coretta Scott King began to take on a more active role in the movement, which after her husband's assassination in 1968, she helped carry on the cause of racial and economic justice. (42) As founder of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the work continues to fulfill the goals of peace and justice.

One of the greatest stories of the civil rights movement have been that Coretta Scott King might have become a great concert singer if things were different.