We All Mourn a True Southern Lady

Born in Marion, Alabama and educated in Ohio and Boston, a young Coretta Scott envisioned a career in music and education. Yet, through a fateful courtship with a bright, young theologian from Atlanta, life took her far from that path and into legendary heights as the wife of Martin Luther King, Jr. Coretta Scott King may have died Monday night in Mexico, yet her legacy as the keeper of her husband’s dream of freedom and equality for African Americans and all of humanity, will be as eternal as the flame that burns at their tombs. Mrs. King was an equal partner to her husband, and she emerged as a forceful speaker for truth and justice, founding the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change shortly after his assassination.

Without a doubt, the intellectual progenitors of the Center for a Better South were influenced by the work of Dr. and Mrs. King, and today, those of us, black and white, who dare to think that what we do will make a difference in the lives of our fellow Southerners owe the King family a debt of gratitude for blazing the trails before us. Coretta Scott King's grace in first fighting segregation and then fostering racial reconciliation and harmony cast a wide shadow over the states of the former Confederacy, and her work helped make the notion of a progressive South a reality. In sacrificing her own self-interest and sharing her dear husband’s life with the world, Mrs. King set a pristine example of forgiveness, love and hope which will make the South, and the US, whole for all of its citizens one day. So, as she will now lay in eternal rest, let each of us commit to doing what is needed and what is right to keep her dream alive for posterity.