| Description: | Encyclopedia article about Coretta Scott King, a proponent of civil and human rights, who helped her husband, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., lead the modern civil rights movement. During their life together, she was his helpmate, raising their four children while supporting his efforts to promote nonviolent social change in race relations during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in 1927 in Heiberger, Alabama, she graduated from Lincoln Normal School, a private school in Marion, Alabama, supported by the American Missionary Association. She then studied music education and sang with choirs at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, graduating in 1951. Her excellence as a singer earned her a scholarship to New England Conservatory of Music in Boston where she received further music training. She often used her singing talents to raise funds for various civil and human rights causes and activities. She and Martin Luther King, Jr., met in Boston and were married in 1953. After her husband's assassination in 1968, she articulated a vision of his nonviolence expressed internationally through the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change that she founded in Atlanta as a memorial to her slain husband. To foster remembrance of his life and work, she advocated a federal holiday to celebrate his January birthday. She died in January 2006 at a holistic health hospital in Mexico and was both the first woman and the first African American to lie in state at the state capitol rotunda in Atlanta, Georgia. She was buried with her husband at the King Center. The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the aggregation and enhancement of partner metadata. |
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