When Martin Luther King Jr. was asked during a 1965 interview if he taught his wife, Coretta Scott King, about issues like world peace, he responded, “I think at many points she educated me.”
In fact, Coretta Scott King took an interest in activism well before she married the man who would become the nation’s foremost civil rights leader. Throughout her 13-year marriage to King and in the decades after his assassination, she worked for justice, standing against racism and war. She championed her husband’s legacy by campaigning to get a federal holiday in his honor and establishing the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change to continue his work.
“She said, ‘I knew I would be Black for the rest of my life, so I could not back down or remain silent in the face of injustice,” says Barbara Reynolds, who along with Scott King, authored the activist’s posthumous 2017 memoir, My Life, My Love, My Legacy.
Born in Heiberger, Alabama, on April 27, 1927, Scott King experienced racism from a young age. Her family’s land ownership made them a target for white racists who burned down their home and terrorized her father because he would not sell his lumber mill. As payback, they torched the business.
“The experiences with the burning down of her family home and the destruction of her father’s business certainly had a profound effect on her ideas about what was right and what was just,” says Kristopher Burrell, an associate professor of history at Hostos Community College at the City University of New York and author of the 2020 paper “I Was Called, Too: The Life and Work of Coretta Scott King.”
Coretta Scott attended segregated Lincoln Normal School, from which she graduated at the top of her class in 1945. From there, she headed to the integrated Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she studied music and elementary education, joined the NAACP and college committees focused on racial equality.
In the 1948 presidential election, Miss Scott supported a third-party candidate for president—the Progressive Party’s Henry Wallace. He opposed segregation and supported voting rights, equal pay, national health insurance, fair employment for women and a guaranteed minimum wage.
Her support of the Progressive Party was not a chapter in her life that she spoke much about, Reynolds says, explaining, “It was always said that it was linked to communism, and she didn’t want Martin’s reputation to be stained by being linked to the Progressive Party.”
Scott was not immune to racism at Antioch College, where administrators did not want to integrate their student teaching program. While Scott’s white peers student-taught in the local Yellow Springs public schools, where the educators were all white, she had to student-teach in a district nine miles away.