Published Feb. 1, 2006
As soon as Taylor Branch’s Delta flight arrived in Atlanta on Tuesday morning, he knew something had happened. His cellphone voice mail was filled with 30 messages. Each carried the same news: Coretta Scott King had died.
“I was just stunned,” said Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian who had come to Atlanta to give a book talk at the Carter Center. “It’s a sad day, but it’s also eerie” to get the news in the city where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was born and where King and his wife lived.
Branch was in town to talk about “At Canaan’s Edge,” the final installment of his trilogy about King and the civil rights movement
But the death of Coretta Scott King caused Branch’s thoughts to shift from King to his wife. For once, she was getting more attention than her iconic husband. Branch had spent 24 years writing his three-volume history, and along the way he developed an appreciation for Coretta Scott King. His conclusion: She had been underestimated.
That pattern started early, said Branch, an Atlanta native.
King’s father, Daddy King, didn’t think his future daughter-in-law was good enough for his son at first. After learning who his son was courting in college, Daddy King flew to Boston where his son was a student and told Coretta that his son would fare better by marrying into a “solid” Atlanta family who could offer more than she --- a country girl from rural Alabama.
“I have something to offer, too,” she told Daddy King in a flash of anger.
What she offered was “extraordinary grace and dignity,” Branch said.
“Dr. King saw that grace and dignity were vital during segregation to give people hope when they were being stripped of their dignity every day,” Branch said. “You needed dignity to give people hope, and Dr. King relied on her for that.”
King also relied on his wife in other lesser-known ways, Branch said. Near the end of his life, King wanted to come out publicly against the Vietnam War and cast poverty as a civil rights issue. But he hesitated because he didn’t want to lose mass support. Before King finally shook his misgivings, his wife had already taken that step.
“She spoke out against the war before King did,” Branch said. “He counted on her to make speeches on war issues that he wasn’t quite ready to make.”
Coretta Scott King was so attuned to the doctrine of nonviolence that she extended the movement to areas not considered by her husband. In her later years, she became a champion of gay rights. Barring gays and lesbians from equal rights contradicted the spirit of nonviolence because it excluded people, Branch said.
Despite her involvement, Coretta Scott King wanted to play a more prominent role in the movement. But her husband balked, telling her that her primary role was raising their four children, Branch said. She then took on another role --- a widow in waiting. She had to prepare herself for the knowledge that her husband could be taken away from her any minute.
“She wrote that everybody involved in the movement was prepared to sacrifice, including her and her children,” Branch said. “She felt that the risks of nonviolence could be accepted because it was redeeming the soul of America.”
And when that moment came --- when her husband was killed in Memphis in 1968, King bore it with the same grace and dignity she gave her husband when he was alive, Branch said. One of the enduring images from King’s funeral is a photo of Coretta Scott King looking resolutely ahead, shrouded by a widow’s veil, as speakers eulogized her husband.
“She never sank in bitterness,” Branch said, “and she never renounced her commitment to nonviolence.”
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