King to talk about husband’s legacy, civil rights movement during Cal U lecture
CALIFORNIA – Coretta Scott King, the wife of slain civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 28, in Steele Auditorium at California University of Pennsylvania. The lecture, entitled “An Evening with Coretta Scott King: The Importance of Her Husband’s Legacy and the Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” is sponsored by the university in cooperation with the Frederick Douglass Institute.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
King is considered to be one of the most influential women leaders in the world today. Prepared by her family, education and personality for a life committed to social justice and peace, she entered the world stage in 1955 as King’s wife and as a leading participant in the American Civil Rights Movement.
Her remarkable partnership with King resulted not only in four talented children, but also in a life devoted to promoting social change, according to a press release.
King has traveled throughout the nation and world speaking out on behalf of racial and economic justice, women’s and children’s rights, gay and lesbian dignity, religious freedom, the needs of the poor and homeless, full-employment health care, educational opportunities, nuclear disarmament and ecological sanity.
In her career, she has lent her support to democracy movements worldwideand has served as a consultant to many world leaders, including Corazon Aquino, Kenneth Kaunda and Nelson Mandela.
Born and raised in Marion, Ala., she graduated valedictorian from Lincoln High School. She received a bachelor of art’s degree in music and education from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She then went on to study concert singing at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, where she earned a degree in voice and violin.
While in Boston, she met Martin Luther King Jr. who was then studying for his doctorate in theology at Boston University.
They were married June 18, 1953, and in September 1954 took up residence in Montgomery, Ala., with Coretta Scott King assuming the many functions of a pastor’s wife at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
During Dr. King’s extraordinary career, his wife devoted most of her time to raising their four children – Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott and Bernice Albertine.
From the earliest days, however, she balanced mothering and movement work, speaking before church, civic, college, fraternal and peace groups.
She conceived and performed a series of favorably reviewed Freedom Concerts, which combined prose and poetry narration with musical selections and functioned as fundraisers for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the direct action organization Dr. King served as first president.
In 1957, she and Dr. King journeyed to Ghana to mark the country’s independence. In 1958, they spent a belated honeymoon in Mexico, where they observed first-hand the immense gulf between extreme wealth and extreme poverty.
Two years later, Dr. King and his wife spent nearly a month in India on a pilgrimage to disciples and sites associated with Mahatma Gandhi. In 1964, she accompanied him to Oslo, Norway, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Even prior to her husband’s public stand against the Vietnam War in 1967, Coretta King functioned as liaison to peace and justice organizations, and as mediator to public officials on behalf of the unheard.
Since her husband’s assassination in 1968, Coretta King has devoted much of her energy and attention to developing programs and building the Atlanta-based Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change as a living memorial to her husband’s life dream.
Situated in the Freedom Hall complex encircling Dr. King’s tomb, the King Center is part of a 23-acre national historic park which included his birth home, and which hosts more than 1 million visitors a year.
For 27 years (1968-95), King devoted her life to developing the King Center, the first institution built in memory of an African-American leader. As founding president, chairman and chief executive officer, she dedicated herself to providing local, national and international programs that have trained tens of thousands of people in Dr. King’s philosophy and methods.
She has guided the creation and housing of the largest archive of documents from the Civil Rights Movement.
But perhaps her greatest legacy after establishing the King Center itself is the massive educational and lobbying campaign, she spearheaded, to establish Dr. King’s birthday as a national holiday.
In 1983, an act of Congress instituted the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission, which she chaired for its duration. In January of 1986, Mrs. King oversaw the first legal holiday in honor of her husband – a holiday which has come to be celebrated by millions of people worldwide and, in some form, in more than 100 countries.
Coretta King has carried the message of nonviolence and the dream of the beloved community to almost every corner of the nation and the globe.
She has led goodwill missions to many countries in Africa, Latin America, Europe and Asia. She has spoken at many of history’s most massive peace and justice rallies. She served as a women’s Strike for Peace delegate to the 17-nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1962.
She is the first woman to deliver the class day address at Harvard, and the first woman to preach at a statutory service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
A life-long advocate of interracial coalitions in 1974, Coretta King formed a broad coalition of more than 100 religious, labor, business, civil and women’s rights organizations dedicated to a national policy of full employment and equal economic opportunity, as co-chair of the Full Employment Action Council.
In 1983, she brought together more than 800 human rights organizations to form the Coalition of Conscience, sponsors of the 20th Anniversary March on Washington, until then the largest demonstration in the nation’s capital.
In 1987, she helped lead a national Mobilization Against Fear and Intimidation in Forsyth County, Ga.
Always close to her family, in 1985, Coretta King and three of her children were arrested at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., for protesting against apartheid.
In 1995, she turned over leadership of the center to her son, Dexter Scott King, who is bringing his own vision to promoting Dr. King’s teachings through information technology.
One of the most visible and influential African-American leaders today, Coretta King has received honorary doctorates from more than 40 colleges and universities.
She has authored three books and a nationally syndicated column. She has served on, and helped found, dozens of organizations, including the Black Leadership Forum, the National Black Coalition for Voter Participation and the Black Leadership Roundtable.
She has dialogued with heads of state, including prime ministers and presidents. She has put in time on picket lines with welfare rights mothers. She has met with great spiritual leaders, including Pope John Paul, the Dalai Lama, Dorothy Day and Bishop Desmond Tutu. She has witnessed the historic handshake between Prime Minister Ytizhak Rabin and Chairman Yassir Arafat at the signing of the Middle East Peace Accords. She has stood with Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg when he became South Africa’s first democratically elected president.
For more information concerning Coretta King’s talk at Cal U, contact Dr. Michele McCoy, Cal U director of public affairs, at 724-938-4155.