My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. by Coretta Scott King

First published: 1969

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1927-1968

Locale: Boston, Massachusetts; southern United States

Principal Personages:

• Coretta Scott King, the wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and the founder of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
• Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta’s husband, the founding president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
• Bernice McMurry Scott, Coretta’s mother, a reserved and cautious woman
• Obadiah Scott, Coretta’s father, an Alabama farmer of modest means
• Edythe Scott (Mrs. Arthur Bagley), Coretta’s sister and confidante
• Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., Coretta’s father-in-law, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta
• Yolanda Denise (Yoki) King, Coretta’s daughter and first child
• Martin Luther King, III, Coretta’s first son and second child
• Dexter King, Coretta’s second son and third child
• Bernice Albertine (Bunny) King, Coretta’s second daughter and fourth child
• Ralph David Abernathy, a close friend of the Kings and their associate in the Civil Rights movement

Form and Content

My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. is more than Coretta Scott King’s autobiography, more even than the story of her marriage. In key respects, it is also a mirror of the African American experience in the twentieth century. In seventeen chapters, an epilogue, and several appendixes, Mrs. King surveys her background in Marion, Alabama, her education at Antioch College (Ohio), and her fifteen-year marriage that ended tragically with the assassination of her famous husband on April 4, 1968. In that sense, her book is personal and traditionally autobiographical. However, its perspective is national and even international with regard to the mission that she identifies throughout as the raison d’être of the couple’s public career.

Her account begins in October, 1964, when Martin Luther King, Jr., resting in a hospital, learns that he will receive the Nobel Prize for Peace. The Nobel Prize reception banquet in Oslo sets the tone for the book by establishing the moral foundations of the nonviolent movement, which the author interweaves with her personal story. King referred in Oslo to the “long road” that African Americans had traveled in their quest for equality.

From that imagery, Coretta Scott King drew the unifying theme of her autobiography. Not only had the road been long and hard for black Americans in general, and for Americans as a whole, but it had also been hard for her family as well. “No one who has not traveled it,” she reflected, “could possibly envision how very long it was.”

For her, it was a journey that began near Marion, Alabama, a rural setting that contrasted sharply with that of her husband’s middle-class urban upbringing in Atlanta. Whereas Coretta’s father, Obadiah (Obie) Scott, was a farmer, Martin’s was the pastor of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. Both, as it turned out, were in Boston in the early 1950’s preparing for professions that at first seemed incompatible. Martin was preparing to be a church minister; Coretta dreamed of a career as a professional musician. After her graduation from Antioch College of Ohio, she was admitted to the New England Conservatory of Music, and Martin began his theological studies at Boston University. The last thing she was looking for in a husband, she admits, was a desire to be a preacher. As she met and fell in love with Martin, however, Coretta adjusted her plans and thus became linked with one of the most influential social movements in American history.

Vignettes and intimate glimpses of details otherwise not available make up much of My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. The first seven of its seventeen chapters deal with the journey to Oslo and the development of Coretta’s life with Martin from 1953 through the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955 and 1956. It is in her candid revelation of personal experiences and feelings, including her initial disappointment when she learned that Martin was planning to be a minister, that readers see Coretta emerge as a distinctive personality. She also shares her concerns about limiting her planned musical career by marrying and her reluctance to go back to the South, from which she had found some escape in Boston—where racial relations were at least formally less segregated.

It is not surprising that the Montgomery experience is central to her story. The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in the capital of the old Confederacy was Martin’s first pastorate, and it was there that Coretta learned to be a mother. Their first daughter, Yolanda, was born in November, 1955, just three weeks before Rosa Parks’s historic refusal to give up her bus seat, the incident that triggered the bus boycott and sparked a new era in the American Civil Rights movement. Like her husband, Coretta viewed the Montgomery experience as pivotal in the emergence of a widespread nonviolent movement. “Montgomery was the soil in which the seed of a new theory of social action took root,” she writes.

The second half of the book is devoted to events between 1957 and King’s death in 1968. These were critical years in the movement’s history. In January, 1957, the process of creating the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began at the Ebenezer Baptist Church at a moment when antiblack violence erupted again in Montgomery. In May, a national “Prayer Pilgrimage” on behalf of minority voting rights was held in Washington, D.C., and with it Martin Luther King, Jr., became an even more prominent national figure because of a rousing speech he delivered called “Give Us the Ballot.”

Coretta recounts these events and then proceeds through the period of the first sit-ins and Freedom Rides (1960-1961), the campaigns in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma (1962-1965), and the difficult efforts to carry the nonviolent message northward into Chicago and other cities after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That she remained at home during most of this period limits her treatment in one sense. In another, though, her perspective is sharp and quite relevant. Through it, readers can see the strains on the Kings’ family life, Coretta’s determination to support her husband’s public efforts, and the weariness that inevitably resulted from almost impossible demands on Martin’s time.

Chapter 14 has a distinctive place in the coverage because of its focus on the watershed period of 1964 and 1965. It was the time of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Nobel Prize award, and the beginnings of Coretta’s Freedom Concert programs. She outlines the music she presented in the series, which underscored the religious foundations of the movement. She also discusses the pivotal importance of the Montgomery movement and describes the August, 1963, March on Washington that was the occasion for her husband’s best-known speech, “I Have a Dream.” This chapter also candidly portrays several painful experiences, including her own difficulties getting the King children into a segregated school in Atlanta. Coretta also relates Martin’s burdensome effort to comfort the family of Jimmy Lee Jackson, a young black man shot to death by police as he tried to protect his family from raiding officers. She also gives some attention to the Black Power movement, an alternative proffered by Stokely Carmichael and other young African Americans who did not share Martin’s patient commitment to nonviolence.

The last section of the book focuses extensively on Martin’s assassination, the details of his funeral, and the vast outpouring of sympathy by the city of Atlanta and by millions of people around the nation. Somehow, Coretta found in the affirmation of her husband’s life and career the strength to go on with the work. She viewed My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. as a major part of her own responsibility for keeping his dream alive.

Critical Context

An ever-enlarging body of literature on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the nonviolent Civil Rights movement has provided the reading public with a massive literature on civil rights history. The availability of King’s papers at the King Center in Atlanta and other libraries and archives has made possible a wide variety of coverage. Most of this has been written by nonblack scholars working within the framework of academia or journalism. Coretta King’s autobiographical account is different from much of this in three respects, and these features define the place of her work in the history of African American literature.

First, she is an African American. Her book reflects the soul-searching quest for personal identity of a young woman who, like her husband, had been forced early to learn the parameters of black Americans’ participation in society. She knew firsthand about the necessity to be the best in order to have a fair chance to enter the prestigious institutions of higher learning or to carve out a career in a society where race loomed larger as a challenge than it did after the Civil Rights movement.

Second, Coretta Scott King was the wife of a man widely regarded as the most influential African American reform leader of the post-World War II period. That was surely not an easy role. She stayed home during most of the campaigns and was thus remote from the detail. She had to keep up with what was going on, to intervene at times to help her husband, to keep up the image of a happy, strong family when pressures familiar to many African American families—such as enrolling children in schools that resisted integration—were making life difficult. Early in the history of the movement, when Martin was promoting his first book, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), he was nearly killed by a deranged black woman who plunged a letter opener into his chest. Frequently, Martin was arrested, harrassed, or injured, and ultimately he was murdered. Her typically calm and optimistic account thus stands in contrast to the negativism that might have characterized a wife’s account of such events.

Third, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the earliest examples of an African American memoir based on experience with the nonviolent movement. Scholars have frequently drawn on such material to enlarge the scope of documents and other more conventional sources. Ralph Abernathy wrote such a book near the end of his life; others, including Clayborne Carson and Jo Ann Robinson, have also added to this literary-historical genre. The value of such works is their unique combination of historical reflection and personal involvement, without which other observers cannot fully comprehend the momentous days of the Civil Rights movement.

Bibliography

Abernathy, Ralph David. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Ralph David Abernathy, An Autobiography. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Few people knew the Kings better than Ralph Abernathy, whose career in civil rights meshed with Martin’s from Montgomery in 1955 until the assassination in Memphis in 1968. Abernathy’s autobiography is thus essential, despite its subjective approach and questionable recollection on some matters.

Ansbro, John J. Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1982. An intellectual history of Martin that complements Coretta’s more personal account. Ansbro reinforces her emphasis upon Martin’s morality based social reform theory. Ansbro’s is the best of the spiritual pilgrimage studies of Dr. King.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986. Although thin as an analysis of King and the SCLC, Garrow’s account is essential because of its massive detail on the life of the famous civil rights leader. This Pulitzer Prize-winning journal of the King years was the first major work to expose King’s personal life to a candid critique.

King, Coretta Scott. “He Had a Dream.” Life 67 (September 12, 1969): 54-62. This compact, illustrated extract from the first edition offers a useful introduction to her historical biography.

Lewis, David Levering. King: A Biography. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. The first critical biography of King, Lewis’ work is nevertheless both much milder in its analysis than recent studies and more valuable in clarifying the motives and goals of the nonviolent movement.

Peake, Thomas R. Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the Nineteen-Eighties. New York: Lang, 1987. The first comprehensive history of the SCLC, this work also includes extensive material on King’s personal life, his relationship to the SCLC, and his theological perspective.