Coretta Scott King, 1927-2006

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Coretta Scott King in Atlanta, GA in 1994. Photo credit - LOC

A civil and equal rights leader, women’s rights activist, musician, and the wife of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.



Born in Marion, Alabama. From an early age, she developed musical skills, singing in the church and school’s chorus as well as playing the violin, trumpet, and piano. She attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she studied music and education. In college, she became active in the Civil Rights Movement, joining several political groups. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she was awarded a fellowship at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In Boston, she met her future husband, Martin Luther King Jr, who studied for Ph.D. at Boston University. She decided to continue her life with him, over her music career, and they got married in a ceremony led by his father in her family house.

The following year, they moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he served as pastor. Although she focused on raising their four children and taking the tasks of the pastor’s wife, she remained politically active and played a critical role in the civil rights movement on her own. She organized and performed in freedom concerts, participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, accompanied her husband in his journeys around the world, including Ghana and India, and worked tirelessly for the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. She criticized the movement’s exclusion of women and spoke out on all matters regarding civil rights, including religious freedom, health care, racial and economic justice, the needs of the poor and homeless, and same-sex marriage. She served as a delegate in the Women’s Strike for Peace Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, and worked as the mediator for various international peace and justice organizations.

After her husband’s assassination on April 4th, 1968, she channeled her efforts spreading his ideology of nonviolence and equal rights to all. She founded and served as the first president of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, demonstrated against apartheid in South Africa and expressed her views by speaking publicly and publishing in nationally syndicated columns. She led the campaign to establish a US national holiday on January 15th, Dr. King’s birthday.

Throughout the years, she served as head of many US delegations, such as the Coalition of Conscience, the delegation of Women for a Meaningful Summit, and the Soviet-American Women’s Summit. She founded dozens of civil rights organizations, including the Black Leadership Roundtable, the National Black Coalition for Voter Participation, and the Black Leadership Forum.

King died at age 78 due to ovarian cancer complications. More than 14,000 people attended her service; among them were four out of five living US Presidents.

Coretta Scott King speaks at Harvard’s Class Day in 1968

Her husband’s death still raw, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, agreed to take his place and speak on Class Day in 1968. By then, the nation was mourning yet another loss. Only six days before she spoke, Civil Rights advocate and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death in Los Angeles.

Coretta Scott King's speech at Harvard (1968)
from the collection of the Harvard Film Archive, Item #5977
Digitized from a 16mm Ektachrome camera original made by WGBH

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“Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.”

“Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.”

Fun Facts

  • She was the first African American to lie in the Georgia State Capitol.
  • Her older sister was the first African American to attend Antioch College in Ohio, and she followed her once she graduated from the segregated high school she studied.
  • On their first date, after two phone conversations, he told her she is the wife he was looking for.
  • She was the first woman to deliver the class day address at Harvard University.
  • She was the first woman to preach at a statutory service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
  • In 1985, she and three of her children were arrested for protesting against apartheid.
  • She was portrayed by Angela Bassett in the television movie “Betty & Coretta.”
  • She was under FBI surveillance after she expressed her views against the Vietnam War.
  • The Coretta Scott King forest in the Galilee region in Israel is named in her honor.
  • The Coretta Scott King Award for outstanding African-American writers and illustrators of children's literature is named in her honor.

Awards

  • More than 60 honorary doctorates
  • The Universal Love Award (1969)
  • The Key of Life award from the NAACP
  • The Gandhi Peace Prize (2004)
  • Inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame (2009)

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Coretta Scott King speaks at Harvard’s Class Day in 1968

Her husband’s death still raw, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, agreed to take his place and speak on Class Day in 1968. By then, the nation was mourning yet another loss. Only six days before she spoke, Civil Rights advocate and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death in Los Angeles.

Coretta Scott King's speech at Harvard (1968)
from the collection of the Harvard Film Archive, Item #5977
Digitized from a 16mm Ektachrome camera original made by WGBH
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This post is also available in: Español

Category: Activism & Feminism, Literature & Poetry, Music, and Politics & Leaders
Tags: Abolitionist, African-American Women, Atlanta Women, Author, and Singer

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Abigail-Smith-Adams-WWP
Activism & Feminism

Abigail Adams, 1744-1818

A Founding Mother of the United States, a Women’s Rights Advocate, and the Second First Lady.

Abigail Smith was born and raised in Massachusetts. Her father was a liberal minister, her mother was a member of the famous Quincy family mother, and she had two sisters. At a time when women were not allowed to receive a formal education, she was homeschooled and satisfied her appetite for knowledge at the family’s library, forming progressive views. After a two-year courtship, she married John Adams, a country lawyer, and became his closest advisor and partner. They settled in the house John had inherited from his father in Braintree, MA. When his practice expanded, John had to frequently travel while Abigail managed their finances, investments, household, and growing family. For a while, they even moved to Boston next to his practice. Between 1784 and 1788, Abigail joined John in his diplomatic missions in Paris and London. On March 4th, 1797, John became the second president of the United States, and she was the first lady. They lived in the Presidential Mansion in Philadelphia and later in the White House in Washington, DC. She was a politically active first lady, made frequent public appearances, and was involved in the decision-making process, paving the way for future first ladies to be proactive figures. When John lost presidential re-election, the family retired to Peacefield in Quincy in 1800. During his frequent travels before and during the presidency, the couple corresponded in more than 1100 letters, where Abigail demonstrated her talent for writing and opinionated spirit. In one of those letters, she urges her husband to consider women’s rights in the new legislation after independence, warning that if not given equal representation: “women will rebel.” He dismissed her suggestion by writing back that it makes him laugh, but her words “remember the ladies” became an iconic feminist slogan. Before her death, she wrote a will favoring her female relatives. It was an act of protest against the laws prohibiting married women from owning assets. Share:This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Ada Louise Huxtable WWP
Arts

Ada Louise Huxtable, 1921-2013

An architecture critic and a writer. Received the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Born Ada Louise Landman in NYC, an only child in a middle-class Jewish family. Growing up in Manhattan, Huxtable loved strolling along the streets, fascinated by its building, such as the Grand Central Terminal, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Natural History. She studied art at Hunter College, graduating magna cum laude, and then architectural history at NYU Institute of Fine Arts. At the time, she worked in Bloomingdale’s furnishings department, where she met her soon-to-be husband, Garth Huxtable. In 1946, at 25, Huxtable landed a job as an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. After five years, she left her job to study Italian architecture in Italy for a year. Upon her return, she began writing as a contributing editor for various art and architectural journals. At the age of 37, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, in which she examined the structural and design advances of American architecture. In 1963, 42 years old Huxtable was hired as the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a position she held for almost 20 years. In her column, she wrote about new and old buildings, threatened buildings, and bad-designed buildings. She also mentioned emerging architects, architectural trends, movements, and exhibitions. Huxtable encouraged the everyday readers to look at buildings from a new perspective, not as an assembly of bricks and pilasters but as a public statement with history and meaning. Raising awareness of the city’s heritage, the urban environment, and civic engagement, she set the tone for modern architecture criticism, for which, at the age of 49, she was the first-ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 1981, at the age of 60, Huxtable received a MacArthur grant that allowed her in-depth research on subjects she was interested in, such as the development of the skyscraper, the negative impact of postmodernism building, and preservation vs. modernity. At 76, she returned to writing for the public as an architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal, publishing columns for the next 15 years. Throughout her career, Huxtable was involved in various committees, serving as a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Architectural Selection and Building Design Committees for the Getty Center, Getty Villa, and as a Jury member for The Pritzker Architecture Prize. She published more than 10 books on architecture, including “Kicked a Building Lately?,” “Goodbye History,” “Hello Hamburger,” and a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. Huxtable died in NYC at 91. Share:This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Agatha Christie WWP
Literature & Poetry

Agatha Christie, 1890-1976

English author and playwright. Known as the Queen of Mystery for her detective novels.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, into a middle-class family. In her early years, she was homeschooled by her parents and taught herself to read at the age of five, against her mother’s wish. In 1901, at 10, she wrote her first poem, “The Cow Slip.” That same year, her father died, and not long after, her mother remarried, and the family moved to Cheadle, Cheshire. She began to receive formal education at Miss Guyer’s Girls’ School but had trouble adjusting to the strict environment. At 15, she was sent to a boarding school in Paris, where she mainly had piano lessons and vocal training. Following her return to England, she began writing short stories reflecting her interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. These include The Call of Wings, and The House of Beauty, later published as The House of Dreams. In addition, she began working on her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, which she tried to publish under a pseudonym but got rejected by six different publishers. In 1912, at 22, she began a relationship with a military officer named Archie Christie. At the outbreak of World War I, he was sent to fight in France, and the couple had to wait for his home leave to get married. During the war, she volunteered as a nurse at the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross. There, she met many Belgian soldiers, which inspired her to create the character of Hercule Poirot – a former Belgian police officer “with a magnificent mustache.” He appeared in Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as the distinguished detective and later in 25 more novels and numerous short stories. That first novel was written in 1916 but was published only in 1920 after Christie signed a six books contract with The Bodley Head publication. After the war, Christie and her husband moved to London, and in 1919 she gave birth to her daughter Rosalind. She continued to write thrillers and murder mystery stories, developing new detective characters, such as Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary and Miss Jane Marple in the short story collection The Thirteen Problems. In 1926, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was an immediate best-seller, and years later was voted the best crime novel ever by the British Crime Writers’ Association. Despite her literary success, she dealt with personal issues. First, her mother died, and then her husband filed for divorce after falling in love with another woman. On December 3rd, 1926, following a fight with her husband, Christie left the house without saying where she was going. The next morning, her car was found abandoned, and the mysterious disappearance of the author became a news sensation. Thousand police officers and 15,000 volunteers searched for her. The author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a medium one of Christie’s gloves to locate her, and a newspaper offered a £100 reward to the person who would find her. Eleven days later, Christie got recognized in a hotel in Yorkshire, where she registered under the last name of her husband’s lover. She suffered from amnesia and couldn’t recall who she was or how she got to Yorkshire. After the incident, she moved to London with her daughter, received psychiatric treatment, and divorced. In 1928, at 38, she took the Orient Express to Istanbul and then continued to Baghdad. While visiting the archaeological site at Ur, she befriended the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who invited her back the following year. Then, she met the archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 years her junior. After they married, she joined him on his archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, which inspired many of her stories, such as the 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. She continued to publish more novels and short stories, and in 1943, after she disliked a stage adaption of one of her novels, she began to adapt her stories into plays. In the early 1970s, her health began to decline. She published her last novel in 1973 and made her last public appearance in 1974. She died two years later at the age of 85. During her life, she wrote 74 novels (66 of them are detective stories), 14 short-stories collections, 19 plays, and an autobiography. Dozens of her works got adapted into films, TV series, and stage plays. Her books have been translated into over 100 languages and sold over 300 million copies worldwide. In 1976, at the time of her death, she was the best-selling novelist in history. Share:This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alice Coachman WWP
Sports

Alice Coachman, 1923-2014

High jump athlete, the first African-American woman to win an Olympic gold medal.

Alice Coachman was born in Albany, Georgia. While in elementary school, her teacher and aunt noticed her athletic skills and encouraged her to practice sports despite her parents’ objections. As a girl in the segregated south, Coachman had no access to athletic training facilities or the opportunity to compete in organized sports events (due to color and gender). Determine to develop her natural talent, Coachman used everything available to her – running with no shoes in fields and dirt roads and making high jump crossbars out of rope and sticks. During high school, Coachman caught the attention of the boys’ track coach, who took her under his wings and coached her. Within a year, she was spotted by a recruiter from Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, and at 15, she got a scholarship. Her unusual jumping style, combined western roll, and straight jumping techniques helped her win the national championships in the next nine years. In 1939, at the age of 16, she started her scholarship at the Tuskegee Preparatory School, which in addition to studying and practicing, required mending uniforms and cleaning the school’s sports facilities. During this period, she won high jumps companions and national championships in the 50-meter dash, 100-meter dash, and the 400-meter relay team. She also won three conference championships as a guard on the women’s basketball team. At 23, Coachman received her degree in dressmaking and continued her education at Albany State College, where she studied Home Economics and science. In her late teens and early 20s, the years that were supposed to be the pick of her career, the Olympic Games were canceled because of WW2. Her first global stage appearance was made possible at the 1948 Olympic Games in London. On her Olympic tryouts, Coachman qualified to the US team with a high jump of 5 feet 4 inches, breaking the previous record by ¾ inch. At the Olympics high jump finals, she reached first place with a leap of 5 feet and 6⅛ inches on her first try, becoming the first black woman to win the gold medal and the only American woman to win a gold medal at the 1948 Games. On her return to the US, Coachman became a celebrity, she met President Truman and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and various parades were held in her honor. Following the Olympic Games, 24 years old Coachman retired from her athlete career, with 34 national titles under her belt. She finished her degree at Albany State College and became a teacher and track-and-field instructor. In 1952, at the age of 29, she made history again when she signed as Coca-Cola Company’s spokesperson, becoming the first African-American woman to endorse an international product. In 1994, at 71, she established the Alice Coachman Track and Field Foundation. This non-profit organization supports young athletes in starting their careers and helps Olympic veterans adjust to life after retainment. Coachman died at the age of 90 of cardiac arrest. Share:This post is also available in: Español Read more...
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