She agreed to marry him all the same. She had scuttled her career as a singer and music teacher to become a preacher’s wife. Rather than devote herself to a career, she agreed to devote herself to him and, when the time came, to their children. So it was that she became a dutiful wife and mother. Years later, she would describe herself as having been his “confidante” and “best friend.” She would say they could “finish each other’s sentences,” and “feel each other’s wounds.”5
For his part, he would extol her as a loyal wife to whom he was grateful for “not hampering his movement activities.”6 The tribute was incomplete. She had done more to support his activism than not stand in his way. They had comforted each other and steeled each other in the darkest hours. When their house in Montgomery was bombed, after his near death from the knife attack in Harlem, during the years of interminable telephone calls to their house from people threatening to kill him, through the travail of his many jail sentences—she was his emotional rock.
That was not all Coretta had done. In one notable coup, in 1960, she had telephoned John Kennedy, who was then the Democratic nominee for president, and prevailed on him to help free her husband from the racially toxic confines of the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville, which Kennedy had done. She had spoken to large crowds, as she did at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. She had sung at fund-raising concerts to prop up the sagging treasury of the SCLC. She had always been there for him and his cause—their cause. All the same, she had played essentially an auxiliary role.
As a young woman she had seemed more likely destined for civil rights activism than King had been in his youth. She had endured greater racist outrages. She was born in a crude, two-room house that her father had built with his own hands. She grew up in virulently racist Perry County, Alabama. (In the nearby town of Marion, in 1958, a jury sentenced a black man, Jimmy Wilson, to death for stealing $1.95 from a local woman. It took an international outcry, compelling a governor’s clemency, to spare the condemned man from the electric chair.) Her entrepreneurial father had angered whites by defying a tacit rule: transporting logs as a business was only for whites. Coretta’s father had nevertheless hauled logs in his truck to the local train station. White racists struck back. When she was fifteen, they had torched her family’s house, leaving behind only charred embers.7
King had grown up in the urban, African American Old Fourth Ward of Atlanta. His had been a life cocooned from the extremes of Perry County bigotry. King would tease Coretta about her humble origins. He would say that if she had not found him, she might be back in the hot Georgia sun picking cotton.8
When she won a scholarship to attend Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio, she received a ticket out of the South. At Antioch she stretched herself politically as a member of the campus NAACP chapter, Race Relations Committee, and Civil Liberties Committee. She clamored for peace at campus rallies and attended a Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia.9
King’s four years as an undergraduate at Morehouse College were very different. He signed up for the NAACP chapter, but that was as far as his political activism went.10
In accepting King’s marital terms, Coretta ceded much of her political latitude to his control. But she never fully resigned herself to that constraint. She urged him repeatedly to allow her a larger role in the movement. She longed to be in the front line of protest. He had forbidden it. Concern for her safety was an issue. He did not want the two of them traveling and demonstrating together at the risk of orphaning their children.11
According to historian Adam Fairclough, she had had “virtually no part” at the SCLC, even though she had begged for a greater involvement in the movement.12 With rare exceptions King had barred her from being with him during his civil rights campaigns. He forbid her from joining in protests, marching in racially tense cities or risking arrest and jail. He told her, “You see, I am called [by God], and you aren’t.”13
As her friend Ella Baker would put it, Coretta’s gender, not just motherhood, had excluded her from playing a significant role at the SCLC. Baker urged her to seek a greater role, to demand a seat among the “councils of men.”14
Baker had been the first executive director of the SCLC. She held that position from 1957 to 1960 but left the organization after a falling-out with King. In her place King installed a man, Wyatt Walker. A personality clash with King may have been part of the reason.15 But Baker saw King’s desire to push her aside as a sexist act. Dorothy Cotton agreed. She would note that “sexist attitudes” within the SCLC meant that “men were the leaders and women were the followers and supporters.”16
Sexism pervaded the whole of the civil rights movement, not only at the SCLC. Stokely Carmichael, referring to his own organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had made the point jocularly, yet notoriously and revealingly: “The position of women in SNCC is prone,” he had said.17
Coretta saw herself as victimized by the sexist mind-set of the time. She groused to him about it but to little effect. Her discontent festered between them, a sore that wouldn’t heal.
That was not the only source of marital friction between them. Sometimes she felt like a single mother, and she shared her frustration
