Coretta Scott King Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Coretta Scott King - Essay Example Discussion Coretta Scott King had worked most of her life for equal rights and peace among the mass. During the time when she was born, African Americans did not have the equivalent rights as other people had. The Scott family was also treated badly because they were African Americans3. The basic identity of Coretta Scott King had been shaped due to racism that she had to encounter in Alabama, in her formative years. She was by then a political activist before her marriage4. She had become a fervent follower of the left-wing Progressive Party, while breaching racial barriers at Antioch College as an undergraduate. Coretta Scott King was attracted to her future husband’s idealism after coming in the New England Conservatory, located in Boston in order to study music. Martin Luther’s rejection of the notion of â€Å"making all the money you can and ignoring people’s needs† had reinforced her own views. They married in the year 1953 and had moved to Alabama, where Dr. King became preacher of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. All through the 1950s and 1960s, she escorted her husband in his campaign for civil rights5. Coretta King emerged as a public figure primarily after the assassination of her husband. She sought opportunities to express her irrepressible idealism. Coretta Scott King joined ‘Women’s Strike for Peace to the Disarmament Conference’ held in Switzerland, Geneva, during the early 1960s expressing her opposition to the Vietnam War several years before her husband was willing to take a public anti-war stand. Similar to her husband, she too viewed the civil rights struggle in the broader context of anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa, in the United States. She along with her husband attended the independence ceremony of Ghana, i.e. Africa’s first black-ruled nation in the year of 1957. In 1959, the Kings travelled to India, where she sang spiritual songs at events in which her husband spoke. After the family moved to Atlanta in the year 1960, she appealed to John F. Kennedy thereby helping to achieve her husband’s discharge from a Georgia reformatory. Furthermore, in 1964, she attended the ceremony in Norway, Oslo for which Dr. King had received Nobel Peace Prize. During mid - 1960s, Coretta King’s association in the civil rights movement had augmented because she took part in ‘freedom concerts’ that encompassed singing, poetry recitation and lectures representing the record of the civil rights movement. The proceeds received were bequeathed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Before 1968, she also maintained speaking about the commitments that her husband could not accomplish6. Coretta, being the founding president of the King Center, not only campaigned assiduously to establish the national King Holiday but also revealed her magnanimous vision of universal peace as well as social righteousness. She had dynamically propagated her husband’s philosophy of nonviolence after his assassination7. She strongly assumed that death penalty continues the cycle of brutality and shatters all anticipations for a descent civilization. Few days after her husband’s assassination, in Memphis, she led a march on behalf of her husband for sanitation workers. In addition, she also launched the