Actor Jonathan Majors took a moment to spread a long-standing falsehood about Coretta Scott King in his first interview following his misdemeanor convictions for harassment and violence. Speaking with Linsey Davis for “Good Morning America,” Majors extolled the virtues of actress Meagan Good, his current girlfriend, saying she acts “like a Coretta,” which is his code word for a dependable companion.
Majors was very mistaken if he believed he was offering the highest praise. His assessment of Good betrayed his scant knowledge of the character and accomplishments of the man he foolishly equated her with. Even more concerning was the fact that his remarks downplayed the significance of Coretta Scott King’s contributions to American history.
In her own right, Coretta Scott King was a passionate advocate for human and civil rights. She was much more than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s devoted spouse. The Rev. Bernice A. King, the youngest of the Kings, made a strong case on X, saying, “My mama wasn’t a prop…My mama was a force.”
Majors was very mistaken if he believed he was offering the highest praise. His assessment of Good betrayed his scant knowledge of the character and accomplishments of the man he foolishly equated her with. Even more concerning was the fact that his remarks downplayed the significance of Coretta Scott King’s contributions to American history.
In her own right, Coretta Scott King was a passionate advocate for human and civil rights. She was much more than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s devoted spouse. The Rev. Bernice A. King, the youngest of the Kings, made a strong case on X, saying, “My mama wasn’t a prop…My mama was a force.”
We should keep this in mind on this Martin Luther King Day.
Coretta Scott was an activist long before she met the man who would become her husband. In the 1940s, she attended Antioch College as a student. She was against racial segregation and did not hold back when she was denied the opportunity to teach white children at a nearby school due to her race. As a result, she became involved in her campus chapter of the NAACP.
As a student delegate to the Progressive Party’s national convention in 1948, Coretta Scott openly supported Henry Wallace, the party’s presidential candidate, who favored ending racial segregation. Her later political work was shaped by these early experiences.
She had to carefully balance the numerous duties of being a wife and mother after her 1953 marriage to Martin Luther King, Jr., which undoubtedly came with its own set of responsibilities and difficulties. She never faltered in her political work, nevertheless. Historian Barbara Ransby “never abandoned her political beliefs or moral convictions,” according to the eminent professor of history, women’s and gender studies, and Black studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She introduced these principles into her marriage and taught her kids the concept of racial fairness and equity.
She backed the efforts of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which Martin Luther King, Jr. and a few other African American activists in Atlanta co-founded in 1957, during the civil rights movement. Through the planning of freedom concerts, she was instrumental in the organization’s fundraising efforts. Her work allowed the group to continue operating and supported activists in their campaign to abolish Jim Crow.
Coretta Scott King was a strong proponent of peace and an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. According to David Stein, an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she was the one who encouraged her spouse to follow suit in addition to taking a strong stance against the Vietnam War.
Following her husband’s 1968 assassination in Memphis, Coretta Scott King made a deliberate effort to uphold his memory. Three of their children and she bravely decided to lead a march in Memphis just four days after her husband’s death. She persisted in demonstrating her unwavering dedication to promoting economic fairness through deft lobbying. According to Stein’s explanation to me, Coretta Scott King’s fight for full employment and a federal job guarantee was supported by her pursuit of economic and racial justice, which she saw as inextricably linked.
About a month after her husband’s murder, on Mother’s Day in 1968, Coretta Scott King and supporters of the Poor People’s Campaign staged a march in Washington, D.C., to demand the enactment of laws aimed at ending poverty in the country. They publicly criticized Arkansas Representative Wilbur Mills, a politician who had obstructed welfare bills while serving as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee.
The National Committee for Full Employment/Full Employment Action Council (NCFE/FEAC), which she co-founded in 1974, carried on her work by advocating for a national employment guarantee to make sure that every American could find “jobs that would serve some human need.”
Apart from her ardent support of economic and racial justice, Coretta Scott King dedicated her life to guaranteeing that her spouse’s accomplishments would be duly acknowledged. According to Jemar Tisby, history professor at Simmons College of Kentucky and author of “The Color of Compromise,” “She had the foresight to collect and preserve his writings and memorabilia.” To achieve this, she established the King Center in Atlanta within two months after King was killed. Tisby continued, “She carefully selected a collection of historic civil rights artifacts and led the effort to make MLK Day a national holiday.”
Ironically, a lot of people undervalued Coretta Scott King’s achievements because of her unwavering commitment to making sure Martin Luther King got the credit he deserved. She spoke out against the attempts to marginalize her since she was well aware of them. She explained to a reporter for the New York Times in 1972 how many people had tried to turn her into “a symbol.” She remarked, “You really aren’t doing very much, really, but being the widow of a great man. You are supposed to grace occasions. You really don’t have very much to say.”
Reminding readers that she was a political activist in her own right, she swiftly rejected this patriarchal framing: “I embraced the cause just as my husband did,
It is important to remind Americans of this. Beyond being a mother and a wife, Coretta Scott King was more. She was a pacifist, a visionary, a leader in the civil rights movement, an adept organizer and lobbyist, a champion for social justice, an activist for human rights, and much more. “Coretta Scott King should be remembered as an independent human being with an identity related to but not dependent on who she married,” as stated by Tisby, rather than only as the wife and widow of Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s a lesson that everyone should learn, not just Majors. It is one that the entire nation ought to observe on this MLK Day.