Martin Luther King's Wife Coretta Scott: First Lady Of Civil Rights
Jan. 14 2022, Published 5:50 p.m. ET
It was during Christmas break at Boston University, 1951, when 22-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. asked friend Mary Powell — an Atlanta transplant attending the nearby New England Conservatory of Music in Boston — if she knew of any “nice, attractive young ladies” who would be a good fit for him.
King was getting tired of playing the field.
“I was about to get cynical,” he recalled. “I had met quite a few girls in Boston, but none that I was particularly fond of.”
Powell handed King the phone number of a young lady from Marion, Ala., named Coretta Scott. Coretta had been given a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and she later said, “I believe it was God’s will and purpose for my life that led me to Boston where I met Martin Luther King Jr.”
King wasn’t thinking about the Almighty when they went on a date.
“I met and fell in love with the attractive singer Coretta Scott, whose gentle manner and air of repose did not disguise her lively spirit,” he said. “After an hour, my mind was made up.”
It was more than her beauty and charm that convinced King. It was more than the fact that, like his beloved mother, an organist, music was a passion for Coretta. What delighted him was when the conversation turned to other topics.
“I never will forget, the first discussion we had was about the question of racial and economic injustice and the question of peace,” King said. “She had been actively engaged in movements dealing with these problems.”
Coretta revealed that her upbringing in the segregated South had encouraged her to stand up for her beliefs — a painful history that the budding couple shared.
“I was told one way or another almost every day of my life that I wasn’t as good as a white child,” she said.
As with King, Coretta credited family with fortifying her sense of self-worth against the relentless tide of racism.
“I was blessed with parents who taught me not to let anyone make me feel like I wasn’t good enough,” Coretta said. “And as my mother told me, you are just as good as anyone else. You get an education and try to be somebody. Then you won’t have to be kicked around by anybody.”
Early in their relationship, King knew that he wanted to marry this woman. “Coretta is going to be my wife,” he wrote to his mother.
“I didn’t want a wife I couldn’t communicate with,” he elaborated. “I had to have a wife who would be as dedicated as I was.”
Though Coretta was in love with King, she had reservations regarding marriage. She enjoyed her life in the North and feared that, once married, she would be stuck in Atlanta as the wife of a preacher, her lifelong musical ambitions permanently sidelined. Fortunately, that was not the future King envisioned.
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The couple married in Alabama on June 18, 1953.
“Although we had returned to Marion to be married by my father on the Scotts’ spacious lawn,” King said, “it was in Boston that we began our married life together.”
They resumed their education and were content — until a year later, when King was asked to become pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. The racial atmosphere in Montgomery was becoming unstable, and the couple sensed an opportunity to facilitate change.
“We reviewed our own growth in the South, and the many advantages that we had been deprived of as a result of segregation,” King recalled. “For several days we talked and thought and prayed over each of these matters. Finally we agreed that, in spite of the disadvantages and inevitable sacrifices, our greatest service could be rendered in our native South.”