My Life, My Love, My Legacy

by Coretta Scott King

  As a faithful teenager, it was hard for me to reconcile the lessons of Christian living I learned in church with the way whites who also called themselves Christians behaved toward us. Sometimes our father would take us to town on Saturdays, where we were greeted by Whites Only signs and made to go to the back door to get a sandwich. When we bought ice cream, we had to wait until all the whites had been served. No matter what flavor I asked for, the druggist would usually give me vanilla—served at the back door. Such treatment made me question whether my skin color was something I could rub off, since it seemed to be the cause of the problem. But church was an escape and a sanctuary from these daily degradations, and it sustained our faith that the Red Sea would be parted and opportunities would await us on the other side.

  * * *

  IT IS OFTEN said that the soul attracts that which it secretly harbors. Mother and I continued to harbor a vision, not out of desperation but out of faith, that I would get the chance to continue my education. Then an opportunity opened that pushed me closer to an understanding of my purpose. Mother figured out a way to send me to Lincoln Normal School, a semi-private high school founded by former slaves and supported by the American Missionary Association in Marion. She sent both me and Edythe there. The AMA, an antislavery society founded by Congregational ministers and laypersons in 1846, provided some of the best education for blacks in the South. Lincoln’s faculty was mixed (half white, half black), and most were from the North. The white faculty treated the Negro students with love. They were dedicated. For that very reason, most of the white townspeople in Marion despised the teachers and delighted in calling them “nigger lovers.”

  There were no dormitories at Lincoln during the years that I attended, and to drive back and forth from Marion to Lincoln each day would have been too burdensome, so I had to stay with other families to be able to attend the school. That was fine with me. I was quite excited to enroll, and felt nurtured and embraced in Lincoln’s halls, though when I tried to take a job doing housework for a white woman in Marion to supplement my parents’ stipend, she expected me to be docile, to scrape and bow and use the back door. Her requests made me feel unworthy. To consent to her demands would have meant that I agreed with her negative assessment of me. I was not then, or ever, the submissive, subservient type. That job didn’t last.

  Regardless of these challenges, at Lincoln I knew I was being shaped for my destiny. This shaping was not the work of human hands, but suggested a divine intervention. I had been plucked from the middle of nowhere, where I was surrounded by islands of hostility, and placed in an environment of enlightenment. White teachers saw worth in me. In time, I saw past the terrible symbols of burning crosses, hateful words, and malicious intent and discovered that there were real, loving people under a skin color that so often meant trouble or heartache for our community. My white teachers laughed, cried, went to church, and attended county fairs. Underneath the skin—the skin that had been so foreboding to me—were people with good hearts and fair minds. It was important for me to understand this. As a child who had seen mostly the worst behavior of whites, it was critical for me to see a better side, and I feel now that these early contacts were divine connections. They reached me before the meanness that I had seen could create cement walls of enmity within my soul.

  Inside the protective walls of Lincoln, my horizons were expanded. I began to understand more about being connected to a larger society and to people outside my community. Despite the reaction of the townspeople, the devotion of the dedicated faculty was richly rewarded by the harvest they produced. A study conducted by the late Horace Mann Bond in the 1950s found that the largest number of blacks with PhDs in the nation had roots right there in Perry County, of which Marion was a part. Another illustration of the school’s influence was revealed at the twenty-fifth reunion of the Lincoln Class of 1943, at which the assembled graduates discovered that all their children who were old enough were either attending college or had completed four years of education at an institution of higher learning. This was Lincoln’s influence.

  It’s also interesting that three major civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph D. Abernathy, and Andrew Young, married women from Perry County, two of whom attended Lincoln. Jean Childs, who was three grades behind me at Lincoln, graduated from Manchester College in Indiana, became a special education teacher, and married Young. Juanita Jones from Uniontown, Alabama, attended Selma University, a prestigious K–12 boarding school for “Negro” children, and graduated from Tennessee State University. She became a teacher and married Ralph Abernathy.

  Many of the faculty impressed me, showing me the kind of person I wanted to become, but one of them in particular, my music teacher, Miss Olive J. Williams, a Howard University graduate, became my first role model outside of my family. She played the piano, directed the chorus, and taught us Beginning Voice and Music Appreciation. She had us singing Handel’s Messiah, which was unusual for a high school in the South in that era. As we went through the vocal exercises, she also taught us posture and good diction, and introduced me to the world of classical music and composers like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin. Before seventh grade, I had never heard classical music. Upon hearing it, I loved it. We learned of the great concert performers of the day, some of whom were black. There was world-famous baritone Paul Robeson. There was Marian Anderson, the world’s greatest contralto; and Roland Hayes, one of the great tenors. Learning about them made me dare to dream that I, too, could become a concert artist.

  Quakers also served on the staff at Lincoln, and they started introducing us to peace activists. I met the great pacifist and peace activist Bayard Rustin, who would later play a key role with my husband and me in the civil rights movement—right there in ninth grade. At Lincoln, he addressed the student assembly and spoke about India’s struggle for independence from the British Empire through the power of nonviolence. He told us how the British beat the Indians to a pulp, but in the end the Indians won their independence without firing a single shot. In a climate so punctuated by violence, I was fascinated by Rustin’s lecture on how conflict could be resolved without war or bloodshed. I pondered the idea and filed it away in my memory.

  Lincoln presented a ray of hope for me. Still, this was a small island in a vast sea of racial hostility; it was not enough. Like so many blacks, I knew I had to migrate from the South. I needed a place to chase my dream, a dream that didn’t have a name or a shape, but that awaited me nonetheless. It was like a pull, a gentle tug with a sharp edge of urgency. I had to escape, to get out of Alabama.

  Thousands of blacks had left before me, either chased out by the tyranny of white folks or led by visions of a better life in a northern promised land. Shortly before my birth, the steady flow of migration began. Southern blacks deserted their marginal farms and sharecropping in droves. By 1923, nearly five hundred thousand blacks had resettled in the North. In 1930, one Negro out of every five lived above the Mason-Dixon line. After World War II another three million left. Some were like my uncle, army sergeant Jasper Scott, who became embittered when he saw that German POWs were treated with more respect than black native sons. After fighting in the war, returning to the South briefly, and working with my father, he moved to Cleveland rather than fight another war at home with southern whites. The South was losing not only its farming class, but also the so-called Talented Tenth, those black men and women who sought higher education and resources to improve their lives and the lives of others.

  My escape route opened up through Lincoln. My sister, Edythe, sang alto with a musical group called the Lincoln School Little Chorus. Lincoln faculty members (and, later, good friends of Edythe’s and mine) Frances and Cecil Thomas arranged for the chorus to go on tour, and one of the stopping points was Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Obviously the chorus impressed Antioch such that two years later, when the college decided to open its doors wider to blacks by granting a limited number of scholarships, Antioch officials contacted
Lincoln to request its two top students. Edythe, who was valedictorian, applied and was accepted. After passing a test, she received a letter offering her a full scholarship, tuition plus room and board. So, in the summer of 1943, Edythe became, for a time, the only black student at Antioch College. She wrote me glowing letters about the respect she received there, so after graduating as valedictorian of my class, I, too, applied, and was accepted in 1945.

  And so it was that one of my mother’s lifelong dreams for me, as well as my own, was coming true: I was going to college.

  TWO

  A Sense of Belonging

  BEFORE I WENT to college, I knew I would have to live and compete in a world with people different from myself. I wanted to be able to hold my own with people everywhere. To do this, I needed a broad-based liberal arts education. For me, Antioch was the answer. Founded in 1852, the college was a pioneer in multicultural living and education. It prided itself on being a laboratory for democracy. It was among the first nonsectarian educational institutions in the United States, among the first coeducational colleges in the nation to offer equivalent opportunities to both men and women, and among the first to appoint a woman to its faculty and its Board of Trustees. It was also among the first to offer African Americans equal educational opportunities.

  At Antioch, I expanded the worldview I had begun to develop at Lincoln. The school had a strong sense of community, a spirit of mutual admiration for others. There was a sense of belonging. And its emphasis on being your “brother’s keeper” and giving service to humankind captivated me. My horizons expanded there as I met people of all different races, cultures, and religions. I had two white roommates, which would have been unthinkable in the South. We got along and found it to be a good experience. With them and other close friends, I began building on the good experiences I had had with whites in Marion, and I remembered my father saying, even during the worst times, “There are still some good white folks.” First at Lincoln, now at Antioch, I was broadening my understanding of whites and coming to see them as people like anybody else, in need of the same basic principles: love, understanding, and respect.

  At Antioch, we were exposed to Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and many other different religions and cultures. Nurtured by this diverse, pro-peace environment, I began to dream of a world in which all kinds of people would be welcome and could live in peace and harmony. Years later, a label would be attached to this vision: the Beloved Community, where love and trust triumph over fear and hatred. The term is most often attributed to the American philosopher Josiah Royce.

  To me, the Beloved Community is a spiritual bond that claims the energies and commitment of a diverse group of people who desire to serve a cause larger than themselves. The Beloved Community is fueled by unconditional love, feels like family, and transcends race, religion, and class. At Antioch, long before I could explain it, I began to put flesh on the skeleton of my thinking about such an ideal, and the education I received and the connections I made prepared me, more than anything else, to be a part of one of the greatest human rights movements of the twentieth century.

  This is not to say that there were not some bumps and bruises along the way, but the hard knocks prepare one for leadership as much as the soft landings. For one, I had to do a lot of remedial work because I had not had the proper preparation in elementary school to high school. And I had to learn how to concentrate. I didn’t know how to study. As a freshman, I had to look up virtually every other word in my textbooks because my vocabulary was very limited. I hadn’t been challenged enough. Now I struggled to catch up. It was very difficult, but in time I did catch up, and here I saw the vision of what I could become.

  I also came rather quickly to realize that the North was not some sort of racial utopia, and that there would still be prejudice and ignorance to face. I learned that Edythe had left some of the negatives out of her letters to me, for fear that I wouldn’t come to Antioch. I came to empathize with her as one of the only blacks. Any black who has been a pioneer, breaking the color line in any corporate, government, or educational position, will know what I mean. Students and faculty considered Edythe an expert in race relations. She was expected to know all about anything that happened to anyone anywhere in black America, and to have answers. Whites wouldn’t want to have normal conversations with her. They just wanted to discuss “the Negro problem” morning, noon, and night. This became a burden. Also, while Edythe was tall and attractive, with that striking Native American look from our mother’s side of the family, none of the white guys had the courage to formally ask her out.

  While Edythe’s Antioch experience was far from perfect, it didn’t sour her on higher education. She transferred from Antioch in her final year, graduated from Ohio State in 1949, received a master’s in English from Columbia University and, later, an MFA in theater from Boston University. In 1954 she married Arthur Bagley, a graduate of Cheyney University who received his doctorate in education from the University of Maryland. Years later, Edythe joined the faculty of Cheyney, where she founded the theater arts major. She retired in 1996, as associate professor of fine arts in the department of English; Arthur was the chair of the industrial arts department.

  When I arrived at Antioch, I saw some of the difficulties Edythe had experienced. What irritated me especially was the ability of some whites to accept me only as long as they could separate me from my race. People would say ignorant things like “Well, you’re so different from the rest of them,” as if they actually knew the eleven million “rest of them.” Often people asked me, “Why aren’t there more blacks at Antioch?” The questioner’s tone usually suggested it was our fault for not being there in larger numbers, giving no consideration to the economic barriers or institutional racism that had been blocking blacks from gaining a quality education since the days of slavery.

  I also faced a painful scenario when it came to my love life, when in my junior year I had my first experience with interracial dating, something that never could have happened back home in the South, where miscegenation was outlawed and punishable by imprisonment. Even in the North, the practice was ahead of its time. The Antioch student body was virtually all white. In my class, there were only a few black students, so there was an unspoken expectation that I would date a certain black guy. My Cupid friends had selected a nice young black man to be my date, but I resented their matchmaking. In retrospect, I see that it would have been nice at least to have gone out with him. He was Leon Higginbotham Jr. (now deceased), who became one of the first blacks appointed to the federal bench.

  I chose, however, to date one of the Jewish guys, Walter Rybeck, a fourth-year student from Wheeling, West Virginia, and my piano accompanist. We dated for about two years, doing fun things together like bird watching and attending folk festivals. We became rather serious about each other and discussed marriage, but I wanted a career, and he was concerned about the racial and religious identity of our children. Would they be half-Jewish, half-Christian, half-black, half-white? We were stymied at the thought of the many barriers we would have to cross.

  We soon had an experience that would answer our nagging questions about whether we could be happy together as an interracial couple. On Tuesday, November 9, 1948, I made my singing debut at Second Baptist Church in Springfield, Ohio, with Walter as my accompanist. The performance, publicized in several local papers such as the Xenia Gazette, was well attended, with more than one hundred people in the audience. Still beaming from our success after the concert, Walter and I attended a folk dancing festival in Wheeling, West Virginia. Walt got out of the car to place a phone call to his parents, asking them to meet us at a certain restaurant in town. When he got back in the car, I had one question: “What about me?” He paused, searching for words. It had not even dawned on him that I would not be allowed to eat at the restaurant he’d selected. When his parents arrived, we ate somewhere else, but the experience depressed me and marred the weekend. It gave us a powerful glimpse of what an interrac
ial marriage would be like and the challenges we’d face if we stayed together. One of us would be welcome somewhere; the other would not be. One would be associated with what was right with the world; the other with what was wrong. All of it was too much baggage for us to carry, and so we broke up.

  Bruised from that heartbreak, I distracted myself with my studies, but racism also challenged me in my degree path. I was the first black person to major in elementary education at Antioch, with a minor in voice. In order to meet all the requirements of my major, however, I had to teach for a year in the Antioch private elementary school and for a year in the Yellow Springs, Ohio, public school system. Because there were no black teachers in the Yellow Springs public school system, I was deprived of my right to teach there. When I took my concern to the supervisor of student teaching, she did not support my right to teach in the local school system. This disappointed me deeply. Instead, she suggested I travel nine miles from Antioch to teach in a segregated school in Xenia, Ohio. Her rationale was that God did not intend the races to mix. When I took the issue to the president of Antioch, he didn’t support me, either. Later, I learned that he had a black dog named Nigger.

  In the end, I was given two options: go to Xenia and teach in a segregated school system, or teach another year at the Antioch school. I refused to go to Xenia. I’d left Alabama to be free of segregation.

  I appealed to the local school board, but that failed. I tried to rally the students to my cause, and after that failed, I appealed to Antioch College’s administration, writing:

  My precious time and money have been spent for a commodity which I never received only because my skin color happened to be darker. No matter how one might try to explain why the school board and the superintendent refused to let me teach in the Yellow Springs Public School, these explanations turn out to be none other than rationalizations and the cold fact is that I was rejected because I happened to be the wrong color. This kind of injustice which I experienced is mild compared to what Negroes are facing all of the time in our society. Do you then wonder why America as a leader among nations in the world cannot command more respect among the common people who make up the majority of the citizens of the world? Her inner corruption cannot long persist without backfiring.