Day 31 of Women's History Month: Coretta Scott King

Ms. King was an activist, author, singer, and civil rights leader. She became politically active while a student at Antioch; she later studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she met her future husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. Ms. King sacrificed her dream of a career as a classical singer; her life became absorbed by the civil rights movement, and by raising her family while her husband was frequently called away by movement work. She lived with death threats; in 1956, their house was bombed. In 1962, she was a delegate to the Women’s Strike for Peace Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. After her husband’s assassination, she assumed a leadership role in the civil rights movement, expanding her activism to include women's rights, LGBT rights, economic justice, and world peace. She founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, and worked to have his birthday declared a federal holiday. She participated in (and was arrested at) sit-ins in DC that started a nationwide wave of anti-apartheid protests. A longtime peace activist, she co-founded The Committee for A Sane Nuclear Policy (now Peace Action) in 1957, and, in later years, opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Ms. King supported LGBT equality, traveling to Washington, DC to argue that the Civil Rights Act should be amended to include gays and lesbians as a protected class. She saw LGBT rights, including marriage equality, as a civil rights issue. In 2003, Ms. King invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to participate in the commemoration of 40th anniversary of the March on Washington, the first time an LGBT advocacy group had been invited to a major event in the Black community.
"Not enough attention has been focused on the roles played by women in the struggle. By and large, men have formed the leadership in the civil rights struggle but...women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement." -Coretta Scott King