My Life, My Love, My Legacy Read online

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  Introduction

  THERE IS A Mrs. King. There is also Coretta. How one became detached from the other remains a mystery to me.

  Most people who have followed my career from afar, or even given me a second thought, know me as Mrs. King: the wife of, the widow of, the mother of, the leader of. Makes me sound like the attachments that come with my vacuum cleaner. In one sense, I don’t mind that at all. I’m proud to have been a wife, a single parent, and a leader. But I am more than a label. I am also Coretta.

  Isn’t it time you know the integrated, holistic woman: one spirit, one soul, one destiny?

  In reading this memoir, I hope somehow you see Coretta.

  As I reflect upon the chapters of my life, peering into the margins and fine print as well as at the boldly illuminated headlines, I am simply amazed. I was born on April 27, 1927, in Heiberger, Alabama, at a time and in a place where everything I would eventually become was impossible even to imagine.

  Who could have dreamed that a little girl who began life as a part-time hired hand picking cotton for two dollars a week in the piercing hot sun would rise to a position that allowed her to help pick U.S. mayors, congresspersons, and even presidents? Or that in the 1950s and 1960s, when a woman’s place (and sometimes her imprisonment) was clearly defined as the home, I would be both an avowed homemaker and a liberated feminist? That I would be able to help build a human rights movement while also raising four beautiful children? And by no means did I dare think as a child that I could ever help create a more humane environment for African Americans: from my earliest childhood, whites regularly terrorized our family, and it was not a crime. In the 1940s and ’50s, one dared not dream of equality under the law. We could not sleep in our beds without fear of being burned out by white vigilantes. We could not walk in the front door of an ice-cream parlor without being shooed to the back. We had to step off the sidewalk and lower our eyes when a white person approached. This is the narrow door I entered as a young girl. It is not the same door from which I will exit.

  The movement did not only lift blacks. It elevated the entire nation toward a place of true respect, love, and justice that transcends race, color, or creed. I call that place the Beloved Community. The road to the Beloved Community is the road of nonviolence. The roadblocks are hate and prejudice. We are not there yet. But there are more doors open than ever before. We stand on the cusp of a new day, one brimming with possibilities that once lived only in the restricted passageways of our dreams.

  In my teen years, I spent a lot of time trying to discover who I was. I used to look at myself in the mirror and ponder why I had been placed on this planet. Sometimes I would grow nervous; it was as though I could perceive myself as another human being, someone much larger than a little country girl sitting on a bench in the backwoods of Alabama. I used to go out in the woods and sit for hours, thinking and meditating. Rodin’s statue had nothing on me. I imagined myself seated next to the proverbial man in the moon, blasting off to adventures far past Heiberger. At thirteen, that was the only way I could transcend the small space I occupied. My mind left home long before I packed my physical bags.

  I hope that now, in some way, you will know this Coretta.

  Of course, while my memoir is about me, it is about Martin, too. Our lives were too inseparable to be perforated. Cutting us one from the other would leave a jagged edge. Yet, I did have a life after Martin, just as I had a life before Martin. I have a purpose. I have a mission, and I have carried it out on the world stage.

  To discover what you’re called to do with your life, I believe you have to be connected to God, to that divine force in your life, and that you have to continue to pray for direction. I did that. My life careened down roads I had never imagined traveling. I took on tasks requiring skills and wisdom I didn’t have until circumstances demanded them. All this kept me on my knees, calling on God. Over the years, as I prayed for strength, I felt a sense of relief. I was doing God’s work, I knew, and He would take care of me and my family. That didn’t mean that nothing bad would ever happen. It didn’t mean that at all. But pain is the price some people have to pay, and death can be a redeeming voice; it can promote change and advance the work of God’s kingdom. I came to understand all this in the early days of the Montgomery movement. And the understanding I found then has never left me: I had a divine calling on my life, a charge, a challenge to serve not just black people, but all oppressed humankind. That calling will be with me to the end.

  As my life unfolded, I saw a pattern. My value system formed and was strengthened through pain and sacrifice—not through talking the talk but by walking the walk in the line of fire. In Montgomery, Alabama, during the famous Bus Boycott, I came to understand what I was made of, what pressures I could withstand without breaking or running away. I was not a crystal figurine, fragile and fearful. If I had been breakable, I would have been a major distraction to Martin. His concern for my safety and that of our children would have prevented him from being able to stand in the line of fire. Instead, he soon found that I could be trusted when facing trouble.

  When I look back on the harassment we endured, on the persecution of my husband and the threats to our lives, I am still amazed at what lies within me. We cannot know how far we can soar until we are tested. Strangely enough, I actually become stronger in crises. I didn’t understand that until I found myself in the midst of a tsunami. During that time in Montgomery, I felt an inner strength; it told me that, if necessary, I could do it again. And again.

  Did Martin ever understand how deep my inner calling was? I don’t think so. It transcended even our marriage, and he sometimes struggled to capture its essence. Once, when we were talking about the importance of ensuring that our children receive a proper amount of attention from their parents, he blurted out, “You see, I am called, and you are not.”

  I said to him, “You know, I’ve always felt that I have a call on my life, too. I have been called by God to do something, too, and I have to do it.”

  Generally, Martin was very encouraging, and there were times when he was frustrated with himself, too; he wanted to be a father who was very involved in the lives of his children, but the movement required so much of his time. In any case, our debates about how best to take care of our children did not disturb me, because I knew exactly where he was coming from. We felt a similar pull, a similar pressure from God. I was married to Martin, but I was even more married to the movement and its mission of helping to create a Beloved Community of compassion, justice, and nonviolence.

  Was my path a lonely one? Yes, at times. You do not lose your husband, who is also your best friend, and not feel lonely. But I was never alone. I had my mother and father, my mother-in-law and father-in-law, my sister and brother, my sisters-in-law, my nieces and nephews, my four wonderful
children, and the King Center, which I envisioned as the West Point of nonviolence, and often thought of as my fifth child. I also felt the warm embrace of that great crowd of witnesses, those yet unborn, who will live their best lives beyond limits because we dared to struggle, to put our lives on the line, to make America and the world a better place.

  When I understood the places I could enter and the heights I could travel, I felt as though I were bringing many of you with me. The doors I entered were locked when I arrived, but through faith and pressure, they opened. Some of you have already walked through. The lessons I learned as a lobbyist, a teacher, an organizer, and, most of all, as a single parent felt teachable by the very fact that I was not missing in action in the midst of crisis.

  * * *

  WHAT DID IT take to stay on the civil rights battlefield after Martin was assassinated? I never knew if the same hate that killed my husband would claim my life or the lives of my four children. For years, I’ve endured death threats. There were bomb threats when I traveled. I had to vacate buildings, get off airplanes, and choose alternate forms of transportation.

  You never knew the stresses and strains I underwent as a woman in a male-dominated culture, because I didn’t complain. Nor did I break. You never knew what it felt like to live in a fishbowl, to know that my conversations and whereabouts were constantly monitored by the government—so much so that Martin and I learned to talk in code.

  There was much I had to learn to do in the course of my life, and I did not have a blueprint. I could not call upon Martin as Martin had called upon me. I made mistakes, but I pray those will be charged to lack of understanding and not to malicious intent. I learned how to lobby, how to advance human rights through the political system, from city councils to state houses to Congress to the White House itself.

  Through these struggles and these learnings, I hope you will see Coretta.

  The Mrs. King you might have heard about cares about thousands around the world, and the thousands yet unborn; Coretta cares about people, one person at a time. Over the years, when I heard about problems involving staff members or neighbors or church colleagues, I got personally involved. I brought gifts. To be a problem solver for those who were too easily dismissed, I called city council reps, mayors, housing departments. I called to stop eviction notices, to help students get into college. I called to recommend good people for good jobs. I was accused of being a micromanager, and I have to admit that in many cases I was that and more.

  I suppose Coretta the person never received much attention because I always found it difficult to talk about myself. If I talked about interactions with people in which I was trying to make a difference in their lives one person at a time, I felt it might create the impression that these acts of kindness were staged for the media. So I kept those personal kinds of things to myself.

  But now is the time to share the story I have wanted to tell for so long. In my first book, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., my focus was on my husband, a man who paid the ultimate price for his commitment to creating a better world. At that time, I felt very strongly that the book had to be about Martin. Now I am turning the page.

  Now I think it is time you knew Coretta.

  CORETTA SCOTT KING

  Atlanta, Georgia

  ONE

  We Don’t Have Time to Cry

  ON THANKSGIVING NIGHT 1942, when I was fifteen years old, white racists burned our house to the ground. It was the home I was born in, as were my older sister, Edythe, and my younger brother, Obie Leonard. My father, Obadiah (Obie), had built it with his own hands in 1920, on my grandfather’s land. The house was simple and plain, but we felt fortunate to have it. We knew scores of black sharecroppers around us who were not living on their own land, and some of their homes were little more than shacks.

  Shortly before bedtime, my parents smelled smoke. In what seemed like minutes, fire whipped through our home. Running for their lives, my parents grabbed my brother, Obie, and made it through the doorway, collapsing onto the grass. My mother’s wails pierced my daddy’s heart. They had escaped the flames with little more than the clothes on their backs. Edythe and I were away, rehearsing for a performance with the school choir. We returned to find that many of our prized possessions (clothes, family albums, our beautiful furniture, and our prized Victrola with the Bessie Smith record collection) were gone. Nothing was left of them but red coals and a dull glob of black vinyl.

  Our father hushed our cries and shook us from our misery. “We don’t have time to cry,” he told us. He led us in prayer and told us to give thanks because we still had our lives. He even made us say we forgave those who had destroyed our home. I repeated the words to please my father, but I am not sure I really meant them.

  I was only fifteen, but I was not naïve. In our little backwoods town of Heiberger, Alabama, terrorist acts at the hands of men and women with hate in their hearts were never far from me. They came with the territory. And we had few ways to get help or justice. We had no phone to call for help, but even if we had, I knew no fire trucks would have come. Nor would police or laws have protected us. In the eyes of whites, we were a black family of “nobodies” living in a place that was not a real town, a mere post office address twelve miles from rural Marion, Alabama—the middle of nowhere.

  Ours was the same cruel reality with which blacks living throughout the South were all too familiar. In 1857 the notorious Dred Scott decision had affirmed that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In 1942, the Dred Scott decision was still the law of the land. White supremacy reigned; antebellum laws protected the white man’s way of life and made ours miserable. Not only did Dred Scott hover over us like a menacing vulture, but the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision engraved inequality in stone under the guise of “separate but equal” provisions. All forms of democracy were beyond our reach, including our vote, won briefly after Reconstruction following the Civil War, but circumvented through grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and outright tyranny.

  A 1940 study on voting practices concluded that black disenfranchisement was nearly universal in the Deep South. In Alabama, as in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, no more than 2.5 percent of Negroes of voting age cast ballots in the 1940 presidential race. In Marion, near where I lived, and the surrounding countryside of Perry County, there were about 1,000 whites and 2,000 blacks, but as late as 1955 only about 150 black people were registered to vote.

  As if the laws weren’t oppressive enough, legal restrictions were backed up by the Ku Klux Klan and mob rule. Between 1882 and 1946, there were about 3,400 lynchings in the South. One of them was of my great-uncle, who had been accused of dating a white woman, although his “crime” was never proven. Proof was unnecessary. All that was needed were innuendo and rumor. Whispers were enough to spark mob rule. One day a white woman showed up on my aunt’s doorstep calling out, “Come look!” What my aunt saw, or so the story goes, was her husband hanging from a sycamore tree. His body was so riddled with bullets that it looked as though it had been used for target practice.

  When my family had our brush with evil the night of the fire, I saw the awful face of hate clearly, although the perpetrators were never identified. I could not see any rational reason or purpose for our being burned out of our home. But when I look back at it through the lens of time, I see those awful charred embers as preparation. That night, I witnessed faith in action. I did not see fear in my father’s eyes. In fact, the very next day, he exhibited nerves of steel. He went to work like nothing had happened, no doubt looking into the faces of those who had done this horrible thing. He would not give the terrorists the satisfaction of knowing their evil acts could bend or break him.

  Our burned-out home served as a primer, a prelude, an introduction. The postcard from hell was my first taste of evil, the kind that shows up at your door in such a way that you can never forget its smell, its taste, its sting. That kind of ugliness would not remain in
the shadows of that dark country night; no, it would follow me for the rest of my days.

  Fortunately, I learned early how to live with fear for the people I loved. As I would go on to face my own fiery trials, I sought to obtain that same kind of internal fortitude that my dad exemplified. He had the ability to deny people with ugly agendas the power to chase him from his mission. When fear rushed in, I learned how to hear my heart racing, but refused to allow my feelings to sway me.

  That resilience came from my family. It flowed through our bloodline. Before I was married to Martin and became a King, I was a proud Scott, shaped by my mother’s discernment and my father’s strength. Knowing what I know now, if I could have chosen parents, I would have chosen exactly the ones God selected for me: a hardworking, faithful, courageous father and a loving, nurturing, farsighted mother.

  My father was one of the most fearless men I’ve ever met. The racial pressure on him was relentless, but it never broke him. Growing up, he provided me with incredible examples of courage. He stood at only about five feet seven inches, but he was a powerhouse. Curiously enough, he was resented because he was a hard worker and independent. He believed in rising before the sun, and would always tell us kids, “Get up early even if you don’t do anything but sit down, so you won’t be lazy.” By 4:00 a.m., hours before daybreak, he would begin to haul lumber. He was the only black man around who had a truck, which he used to transport logs. He also cut hair, collected and sold scrap iron, and did other odd jobs to pick up extra income.

  It seemed like my father was always being threatened, especially when he hauled his lumber to the train station. The whites, who were angry because he was in competition with them, would lie in wait, stop him on the road, pull out their guns, and curse him, calling him every name they could think of. He told us he never took his eyes off them. “If you look a white man straight in the eyes, he can’t harm you,” he said. When he was threatened, the other black men who worked with him were so frightened they would disappear into the woods, leaving my dad alone. But he never ran. If he had, they might have shot him in the back.