How Coretta carved her own path
By Khari Thompson
“She was a person long before she married Martin Luther King Jr.,” says Dr. Hamilton-Mason, Associate Dean and Professor of Social Work at Simmons University and Embrace Scholar in Residence. “Not just a partner in the Civil Rights Movement, but an intellectual, an artist, and a leader whose own moral vision helped to shape one of the most significant social justice movements of the 20th century.”
Coretta Scott had her own story before she came to Boston and met the man who would become her husband.
While at Antioch, King joined the NAACP and furthered her own interests in nonviolence and pacifism rooted in Gandhian philosophy. This critical stage in her development, Hamilton-Mason said, likely influenced Dr. King to incorporate Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence into his work because “she embodied that in her own life.”
“She said it put flesh on the skeleton of ideas about justice and peace that she had not even intuitively fully articulated,” Hamilton-Mason explained.
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Coretta Scott King holding a candle and leading a march at night to the White House as part of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, which took place on October 15, 1969. (Photo: Library of Congress) |
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After Antioch, Coretta landed in Boston on a scholarship to the New England Conservatory and found a room at 558 Massachusetts Avenue—home of the League of Women for Community Service. Founded in 1918 by educator and activist Maria Baldwin and publisher and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, the League was a center of Black intellectual and cultural life in Boston.
Additionally, the League housed Black women shut out of college dormitories by segregation in the 1940s and 50s. Coretta was one of them.
Shortly after, her friend, Mary Powell, arranged for her to meet with a Boston University theology student named Martin Luther King Jr. From there, as some would say, the rest is history. But Hamilton-Mason emphasized that Coretta Scott’s journey toward the civil rights icon she would become was already in full swing by the time they met and fell in love.
“She entered the Civil Rights Movement already prepared to do the work,” Dr. Hamilton-Mason said of Mrs. King. “She was already intellectually and politically prepared.”
As with many women of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, Hamilton-Mason added, that work often took place in the background as “invisible” leadership. Mrs. King did this while raising four children and, up until her fourth child, Yolanda, was born, still performing hundreds of concerts as a highly regarded musician and singer: “That’s a lot of work—raising children at a time when women were expected to be the primary caretakers,” Hamilton-Mason said.
That incredible work ethic and skill is why, following Dr. King’s assassination 58 years ago this month, Mrs. King was more than prepared to carry the movement forward—and expand it.
She spent much of her later years publicly linking racial justice to LGBTQ liberation—speaking at Pride, backing anti-discrimination legislation, and opposing a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Because to her, the sense of belonging she spent her life trying to create for others, that “skeleton of morality” she’d spent all those years adding flesh and blood to, had to include everyone.
As her centennial approaches, Hamilton-Mason believes Mrs. King and the Black women leaders of years past provide the blueprint we must follow to usher in a new era for civil rights amid our country’s regression.
“Black women quietly create places of nurturance,” Hamilton-Mason explained. “…It’s in collective work—working in community, working in disparate ways with disparate groups, and having coalitions around an agenda that’s not elevating one individual but elevating small clusters of people.
“They created places where they could do it for themselves. And I think that’s the lesson for today—to create a community of caring.”
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