What The Hell America!

“Women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement,” Coretta Scott King stressed in a 1966 interview with New Lady magazine. The national media, like most politicians and pundits of the time, had trained the spotlight on the male leaders like her husband, missing the many women that had envisioned, led, and organized the movements burgeoning around the country. They could not conceive of Coretta Scott King as Martin Luther King’s political partner. She later lamented how she was “made to sound like an attachment to a vacuum cleaner, the wife of Martin, then the widow of Martin—all of which I was proud to be. But I was never just a wife, nor a widow. I was always more than a label.”  

That marginalization has continued. A mountain of books on Dr. King quote his many advisors, missing that perhaps his most important one was Coretta Scott King. As she explained, “I keep seeing these books and I say, ‘It didn’t happen that way.’ … And that becomes history if you don’t correct it.” Theirs was a political and intellectual partnership from the beginning. Martin Luther King married a feminist intellectual freedom fighter with unflinching determination—“beyond steel” her friends said—and he could not have been the leader he was without her. She was the family leader on issues of peace, war, and the economy. Their relationship challenged certain dominant social and gender conventions of the time, even as it hewed to others.  

Women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement.

Coretta Scott King

At a 1986 conference with many leading King scholars, Coretta Scott King underlined that “[t]he next time we have a conference on him I want to see more women scholars. He allowed me to be myself and that meant that I always expressed my views.” 

And so in my book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr’s Life of Struggle Outside the South, I have picked up her call. The result is a very different sense of their partnership, their critique of racism, poverty and war from the outset, and their longstanding understanding of segregation as a national, not regional, problem and the limits of Northern liberalism at home, rooted in their experiences in school in the North.

The following is an excerpt from King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South.

Meeting the Formidable Coretta Scott

Part of why Martin Luther King Jr. had gone to Boston was to deepen his intellectual foundation in the social gospel and praxis for social change. He would find part of that grounding in a formidable New England Conservatory of Music student named Coretta Scott. Politically engaged, religiously driven, and more of an activist than Martin when they met, Coretta would help expand the various strands of his political and religious convictions.

Coretta Scott had grown up in a proud, independent farming family near Marion, Ala. Nearly all the Black people in their Alabama community owned their own land, angering neighboring whites. Their family was harassed and threatened repeatedly. When her father started transporting lumber—a business reserved for whites—whites torched their house to the ground. And when her father refused to sell his business to a white man, they burned the business too.

“Our father was the subject of almost constant threats,” her older sister Edythe explained. Those experiences and the pride her parents instilled in her helped prepare Coretta for what she would encounter as an adult.

Coretta Scott was a “tomboy” growing up: “I was tough … I would fight; real fight, real hard. And I used to fight my sister and my brother when they did anything that I didn’t like, so they used to call me mean…  [A]s I got to become a teenager, I began to be much more ladylike, and I stopped fighting.”

Her mother had been keenly determined that her children get a good education (beyond what was available to Black children locally) so she enrolled Edythe and Coretta at Lincoln Normal School in Marion. To attend, Coretta lived for the first years with other Black families, until her mother learned to drive a bus to transport them so her daughter could live at home the last two years. At Lincoln, Coretta was introduced to Bayard Rustin, who came to the school to speak about nonviolence. She and her classmates were awed when he said he refused to sit in the Jim Crow sections of trains and buses and showed his scars to prove it.

Following her older sister Edythe (who was the first African American to attend Antioch College in Ohio in decades), Coretta Scott received a scholarship to Antioch, where she majored in music and elementary education. Her mother’s tenacity, plus her own feelings “that something must be done about discrimination against the Negro,” meant she arrived at Antioch already determined. Like Martin, she left the South for new opportunities, and Antioch opened many.

But like Martin, it was daunting being one of only a few Black students on the campus. “I was so inhibited. … My previous study habits would not suffice. … I found myself baffled when asked to make comments in ordinary conversations.” Self-doubt accompanied much of her time at Antioch, though a school counselor helped her to scale back the self-recrimination and find her own pace.

My precious time and money have been spent for a commodity which I never received only because my skin color happened to be darker. … The same thing I left Alabama to get away from.

Coretta Scott King

Attending the nearly all-white college also provided a key launching pad for Coretta’s own politics, as she became active in the NAACP, the Race Relations Committee and the Civil Liberties Committee on campus. She met Rustin again at a campus talk. “It was at Antioch that I first became aware of the relationship between peace and justice and came to see without justice there can be no peace.”

But she also confronted being the “token” Black and the limits of her classmates’ and the school’s progressivism. Her classmates would periodically ask offensive questions like, “Why are Negroes loud and immoral?” then qualify them by saying how she was “different.” She felt compelled to try to challenge their assumptions and explain how “conditions make them that way.”

Being an education major qualified Coretta Scott to student-teach, but Antioch sided with the local school board’s decision not to allow her or any other Black person to student-teach in the city’s schools. She was dumbfounded and very, very hurt. “Well, it happened here. The same thing I left Alabama to get away from.” Antioch wanted her to student-teach at a segregated Black school in Xenia, Ohio.

But she refused, writing the school a powerful indictment of U.S. Cold War liberalism: “My precious time and money have been spent for a commodity which I never received only because my skin color happened to be darker. … Do you then wonder why America as a leader among the nations in the world cannot command more respect among the common people who make up the majority of the world?”

She also attempted to get her white classmates to protest the college’s decision with her, but they refused, worried that their opportunities might be taken away too. “Most of the students would not even discuss the subject with me.” So even her classmates, who prided themselves on their progressivism (and many were active in various causes), grew wobbly when addressing racism in their midst, fearing it would impinge on their own standing.

She took her case directly to Antioch’s president, but he refused to do anything. Coretta was “shattered,” according to her sister. She had become “the victim of racism at one of the most liberal white colleges in the country.” She felt abandoned; she talked with a fellow student from Kenya but had “no body of support around me.” Her counselors whom she loved, including the one Black faculty member at Antioch, were supportive but said they couldn’t do anything.

Later, she said that Antioch’s failure to live up to its values helped her develop “a sense of fortitude” and “made me determined to become more involved in addressing issues of social and political injustice.”

Coretta dated a handful of men, including a Jewish student, at Antioch for two years but, like Martin, she grew wary of life in the U.S. in an interracial relationship, and they split up. Even though her classmates were unwilling to confront the college’s racism, many Antioch students were deeply critical of Cold War militarism. Because of this, some young men filed as conscientious objectors to the Korean War. She and other students organized to support them, and Coretta’s own global peace politics grew as a result.

Introduced to the Progressive Party by some of her professors, Coretta Scott supported Henry Wallace’s third-party campaign for president in 1948. Wallace was challenging incumbent Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey from the left for the U.S. presidency around issues of segregation, economic justice and Cold War militarism. But the Progressive Party’s interracial antiracism and global vision were treated by many Americans as communist sympathy.

Nonetheless, Scott attended the Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia in July 1948, one of only 150 Black people of more than three thousand delegates. At the convention as a student delegate, she heard political activist-author Shirley Graham (who married W.E.B. Du Bois three years later) deliver a powerful keynote speech denouncing war; linking militarism to decreased social spending for education, health care and housing; and demanding an end to Jim Crow in America. Pete Seeger performed.

Many FBI agents were on hand to surveil the proceedings. Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s former vice president, supported voting rights and a national health care system while opposing segregation and the United States’ hawkish Cold War policy. Many leftists and civil rights activists welcomed Wallace’s campaign, as Wallace’s run would force Democratic presidential incumbent Truman to become more forthright on civil rights. Both Harry Belafonte and Paul Robeson were key Progressive Party supporters, speaking at rallies throughout the country. For that work, both would be blacklisted and Robeson’s passport revoked.

Coretta Scott had heard Robeson sing at Antioch and speak in Philadelphia—and admired him incredibly for the ways he combined singing with social issues. At a state meeting of the Progressive Party in Columbus, Ohio, she met and sang for him. He encouraged her to continue with it. The Progressive Party, according to her sister Edythe, “exposed her to the national debate regarding racial equality, economic justice and international peace—issues she would spend the rest of her life promoting.” These were courageous politics, putting Coretta Scott on the left when it was being massively red-baited. She didn’t talk about it publicly much. “I didn’t want it to become a noose around Martin’s neck,” she later explained.

Determined to pursue a singing career, Coretta Scott received a scholarship to attend the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music. It didn’t cover her living expenses in Boston; worried about how she would survive, her father didn’t want her to go. But she forged ahead. Her mother had told her to “get an education. Be somebody. And you won’t have to depend on anyone. Not even a man.” Music was a way forward. She wanted to be a female Paul Robeson.

In the first weeks after arriving in Boston in fall 1951, Coretta ran out of money. Terrified and proud, she didn’t want to ask for help, but she did, calling on a network of Antioch alums, who stepped in to find her a job, albeit in a racially gendered position.

She began doing live-in domestic work for an Antioch alum in the fashionable neighborhood of Beacon Hill. Along with three Irish women who served as maids and a cook, she scrubbed floors, cleaned the bathrooms, and did washing and a variety of household tasks to be able to live and eat. She was “the only black living in the Beacon Hill section and I did not feel comfortable going to the churches in that area.” (Housing for conservatory students, had she been able to afford it, was also segregated.)

Still, she worried, “I have to prove I am worthy of this.”

Some classmates found her aloof, both because she was a reserved young woman and likely in part because she was busy balancing her work off-campus with her conservatory study.

Initially, when her friend Mary Powell, who knew Martin King from Atlanta, brought up meeting the young minister, Coretta Scott said she wasn’t interested in a “whooping Black preacher.” In her experience, people who wanted to be ministers were often “very narrow” and “overly pious”—“trying to look the part but … not intelligent, committed persons.” She wanted someone with a political and religious vision closer to hers. She too was a deep Christian, but it was rooted in what you did in your life, not in the suits and sanctimony of many of the preachers she had experienced. Like Martin, her Christianity pushed her to pursue social change in this world, which hadn’t been the case in most of the churches she knew.

But King pursued her. Martin dated a variety of women in Boston and was also still dating Juanita Sellers, his longtime sort-of girlfriend from Spelman whose family was prominent in Atlanta’s Black community like King’s. But he was looking for more. He wasn’t bothered, she later learned, when Mary had told him Coretta didn’t go to church.

“That’s all right,” he told Mary. He did not want someone who was “a fundamentalist.”

They had their first lunch date in January 1952. To her surprise, she found “a thinker,” and he found an intellectual as well. Coretta Scott’s influence on Martin King began on their very first date. Their first discussion was about racism, war and peace. He had never met a woman like her.

“He wanted to test me to see whether or not I was a thinker,” Coretta recalled, “because he always placed a great value on thinking … not having someone who was, who looked well, but shallow, you know. So anyway, the conversation … had something to do with communism versus capitalism—and I made an intelligent comment. And he said, ‘Oh, I see you know something other than music.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Of course I do. I’ve been to Antioch College.’ But anyway, I didn’t say that to him.” Martin was trying to see how she thought and got more than he bargained for. He was awed and, frankly, seduced by the ways she raised the bar on what he had imagined in a woman.

At the end of their first date, he told her that she had “all the qualities he wanted in a wife—beauty, personality, character and intelligence.” Incredulous, she responded, “you don’t even know me.” On the phone before their date, he had been charming, trying out some of his best lines—he was Napoleon and she was his Waterloo—“intellectual jive,” she thought. She didn’t let him get away with some of the easy charm or general statements he was used to proffering. Martin was going to have to bring out his substance to win her over. But she agreed to another date.

In many ways, meeting Coretta Scott opened new worlds for Martin Luther King. Indeed, when their courtship began, she was more committed, according to SCLC colleague Andrew Young, “to get into the struggle to do something about race than either Martin or I.” From the beginning, according to his sister Christine, Martin liked how self-assured and unapologetically Black Coretta was. She liked how “relaxed and free” Martin seemed, so “secure with himself.” And funny; he could keep her in stitches for hours.

As they continued dating, they talked about her disillusionment with the church and its narrowness. Martin “didn’t criticize me.” He didn’t judge.

In many ways, Coretta was living the radical Christianity that Martin had also sought. “I had realized,” she said, “that carrying all the forms out did not make you religious. What you did in your life … really mattered.” Her faith didn’t need a building; it was rooted in the kinds of justice and life choices that they as Christians pursued on earth. While men like Benjamin Mays and Howard Thurman have been credited for providing Martin Luther King with the foundations for a liberatory Christianity, Coretta Scott also played a crucial role. If Martin had left Atlanta to acquire a more grounded Christian praxis, he found that in her.

Coretta became increasingly impressed with his vision and determination to be a minister who challenged the American racial system. “He sounded so much like he went to Antioch.” She thought, “[H]ow can you talk this way? … [T]his is so wonderful, you know, that he really is very serious about working to change society. And he seemed so sure that he was going be able to do it.”

In their conversations, she saw her views were “more global and pacifist, while his were more focused on direct action to change the oppressive structures of black America.” She sent him a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward. Perhaps to try to impress his activist girlfriend, Martin wrote back laying out his own philosophy. He was “much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he wrote, and the gospel he wanted to preach to the world would be for “a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color.”

Martin liked that he had to work to impress her. With her politics and Progressive Party experience, Martin “stepped into her space,” Harry Belafonte explained. Martin told Coretta that he didn’t like how capitalism was practiced in the U.S., “taking all you can get and not being concerned about other people.” He shared with her that his father “loved money” and cared about his own family more than the broader needs of the community, which was not what Martin wanted to do.

Independent and “ferociously informal,” according to James Baldwin, Coretta still worried about how “circumscribed” her life would become if she married the young minister. “I didn’t want a man that would lead me, I was thinking in terms of where I would go myself.” She hadn’t planned on marrying till after her career was established, but he was “so persistent and determined.” Key to their emerging love was this shared political-intellectual companionship they found in each other, a vision of a partnership that defied certain social norms of the day. Martin wanted a wife he could communicate with and was as dedicated as he was to pursuing change. She agreed. “I didn’t learn my commitment from Martin, we just converged at a certain time.”

“It wasn’t love … at first sight,” she explained. “But he was such an extraordinary human being, and our values were so similar and our outlook were so much alike, we made a good couple. … [I]t took a lot of praying to discover that this was probably what God had called me to do to marry him.”

A cerebral person, according to her sister Edythe, Coretta thought through their relationship for months: what her life and career would become, if he would be serious in challenging racism, what her own contribution would be, if they could have a big and different life.

Fifteen years later, as she was interviewing Coretta Scott King, editor Charlotte Mayerson was incredulous at this story of their romance: “Wasn’t it unusual to think all of this out so thoroughly?” No, it wasn’t, Scott King said firmly. Thinking through things was always her way. “I tried to face them. I didn’t try to run away from them.”

That thinking, the ability to face things and move forward, lay at the core of her inner strength and the partnership they found in each other. Indeed, Coretta was perhaps the more analytical and Martin the more emotional of the two.

Her friends worried about her career and whether Martin would amount to much. But she decided that despite the sacrifices, she loved his spirit, commitment and vision and how well it dovetailed with hers. He reminded her of her father.

By the end of her first year, Coretta moved from Beacon Hill to Martin’s neighborhood, renting a room from the League of Women for Community Service in the South End.

King was still dating Juanita Sellers, whom his parents, particularly his father, wanted him to marry; they had an easy companionship, and she came from the right kind of family. But Juanita didn’t fully share his political vision and willingness to go where they were needed. After Martin’s prodding, Coretta visited him in Atlanta in June on her way to Alabama. King’s father wasn’t wholly welcoming, talking to Coretta about what other young women like Juanita had to offer his son. Coretta bristled, sternly telling him, “I have something to offer too.” She felt a “bit provoked by this. … He didn’t know me.” Coretta wasn’t afraid to take on King’s father.

When Edythe met him, he also grilled her. Edythe bristled: “I assured the Kings that Coretta was one of the strongest people I knew and that she had an iron will and inexhaustible physical stamina. … In my opinion, Coretta had no need to bargain for a husband.”

Then, when the Kings came up to visit them in Boston that fall, Daddy King told Coretta not to take his son too seriously because he had another woman more suited to marry. Martin just sat there not saying a word, “grinning … like a little child. … He was always so respectful of his father.” It made her angry. Why wasn’t he saying something?

Instead Martin got up and left her with his dad; he was going, she later learned, to tell his mother that he was going to marry Coretta. Martin was not good at confronting his father directly, Coretta explained. “He made his decisions and whenever he didn’t want to tell his father something, he would just go out and make it. And his father would hear about it.”

Later, according to his father, Martin made clear: “She’s the most important person to come into my life.”

Coretta had no need to bargain for a husband.

Edythe Scott Bagley, Coretta Scott King’s sister

They got married June 18, 1953, on her parents’ lawn in Alabama. But their wedding too bucked the conventions of the time. She told her imposing father-in-law to take the word obey out of their vows. She and Martin didn’t want to promise to obey: “It made me feel too much like an indentured servant.” Against traditional forms of marriage, she decided, “I’m not going to wear a white dress.” Instead she wore a light blue, wald-length (not floor-length) dress—testament to the early feminist she was and that Martin had fallen in love with. Not interested in materialistic things, she refused to select a china pattern. She would be Coretta Scott King for the rest of her life—keeping her maiden name as part of her name, unlike most women of her generation, but perhaps inspired by the example of Shirley Graham Du Bois, who had impressed her years earlier.

That is not to say Martin was the kind of feminist Coretta was. He surely was not. In some ways he wanted a “shared relationship,” but in other ways he wanted to work and provide for her and, in time, the kids they would have. He had wished his mother questioned his father more—and so he sought and had found this quality in a life partner. Yet he was also used to spaces where men led and women followed—not to mention all-male spaces of leadership and discussion. He did not always listen to women in the ways he listened to men. Coretta said “it was an adjustment to make” from her time at Antioch, where women were encouraged to “assert themselves.” Many of the people who gravitated to the Progressive Party and the kinds of race-class politics that Coretta Scott possessed were also thinking critically about gender roles, historian Dayo Gore shows. And so she was far ahead of him in her thinking about gender. This independence would provide a foundation for the ways she would enable their civil rights activism and his leadership in the years ahead.

But one of the gifts Martin embodied that she most appreciated was that he “let me be myself and that meant I always expressed my views.” He was a listener and didn’t make her feel weird for how she was. He wanted her to be a thinker and not always agree with him. Admiring the activist-intellectual she already was, he moved toward her politics and activism, and she gravitated toward his vision and determination.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved captures the gift of love that is having “a friend of my mind.” This, in slightly different ways, is what Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott brought each other—to love each other’s minds, their spirit and personhood, their deepest aspirations for change and the self they wanted to be in the world. Martin had chosen Coretta for a wife because of who she was, because of her willingness to challenge things (including him), because she imagined that the ways of their parents and American society did not have to be the way they would be, and because she lived her Christianity and was determined to have a different life that challenged racism, war, poverty, and social convention. He would not have become the leader he became without her.

Martin and Coretta’s married life began in the segregated Cradle of Liberty, where white Bostonians liked to boast of their openness and Black people were relegated to certain parts of town with poor schools and inferior municipal services. Coretta referred to Boston as “up South.” But this segregated reality has been left out in most accounts of their early life together.

They first lived at 3396 Northampton, a dilapidated six-story former hotel in Boston’s South End that would get torn down in the 1960s. They were both busy, him writing his dissertation and her studying, teaching music and preparing for final recitals. They went food shopping together. In that first year, he did “all the cleaning … and the washing.” And on Thursday nights, when her class ran late, he would cook dinner—smothered cabbage, corn bread and fried pork chops were some of his specialties. Martin was “sure in his manhood,” she noted, not self-conscious about sharing the housework.

While they didn’t meet, in the winter of 1954 Malcolm X lived five minutes away—and the Cradle of Liberty’s racism and performative liberalism had a decisive impact on all of them. When an interviewer in 1968 asked about their experience as newlyweds in “integrated” Boston, Coretta Scott King scoffed. She and Martin had talked a lot about how “the integration in the North was not real yet. … There was not law that you couldn’t mix but it was just that the negroes were still isolated. … The whole thing was superficial really … that was the reason that even now in the north really you have so much segregation.” While she made some white friends, she noted how little contact Martin had with white Bostonians.

In September 1954, Martin accepted a call to the pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. He had told Coretta when they were courting that he imagined moving back south “to where I was needed.” Describing a “moral obligation to return,” King wrote three years later that “we had the feeling that something remarkable was happening in the South.” But moving back to the South was a difficult decision, and he and Coretta talked through what it would mean to return to the strictures of Southern-style racism and the kind of education their children would receive. According to Edythe, Coretta wanted to stay in the North; she knew Alabama “too well” and was sure a singing career would be easier in the North. Moving to the South to be a preacher’s wife meant giving up the career she had been training for, and Coretta worried about their marriage narrowing her. But Martin was determined.

Upon moving to Montgomery, he finished his dissertation, writng BU in 1955 that he could not afford to come back for graduation. “King … never forgot what he had learned in and about Boston,” Rev. Haynes observed.

The civil rights leader that King became over the next years was indelibly shaped by spending his formative young adult years in the North. Both he and Coretta had come of age amid the segregation and disappointing limits of Northern liberalism. If Martin had gone north for opportunities, perhaps the greatest opportunity he found was a life partner who understood the trifecta of racism, poverty, and war and was hell-bent to challenge them.

Three crucial facets that would set the course of their lives—their understanding of the breadth of American racism, the importance of a Christianity rooted in social justice, and a partnership that attempted to challenge conventions of the time—had been set in motion. Scott King would tell the Pittsburgh Courier just a few years later, “Our romance prepared us for our ordeal. It would have been a most difficult period if the strong bond between us didn’t exist.” And so it is no surprise that as an unexpected opportunity emerged in Montgomery to put their convictions into practice, they heard the call.