Two months after that depressive episode lifted, something strange happened. I was told a close friend had committed suicide; just got a gun and blew her brains out. It weighed so heavily upon me. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see her shooting her brains out, even though I wasn’t present. I had to go see a psychiatrist; I was prescribed sleeping pills. When I look back at that time, I know it was the Holy Spirit that ministered to me, that stopped me from killing myself. He became real to me then. In my spirit, I actually heard the Lord saying to me: “Put the knife down. You have purpose, and people are going to miss you.” At that time, I was feeling unloved, thinking nobody cared about me. But my mother comforted me. She came to me. I could feel her unconditional love, and I was able to come off of probation and eventually graduate.
Always, my mother gave me unconditional love. She never argued with me about the state I was in. She just helped me move out of it.
For years after my mother’s good friend Betty Shabazz died, there was a lingering sadness. I began to pray that my mother would once again have the opportunity to truly let her hair down and have fun out of the glare of the spotlight that comes with being a celebrity. I was so happy when God answered my prayers through Maya Angelou. She and Oprah developed a great friendship with my mother, the three of them. They attended parties, gatherings, and cruises together. I remember in 2004, Mom was invited to Oprah’s fiftieth birthday party cruise. And boy did she have a blast. Usually when she returned from one of those events, she would be laughing, almost giddy, like a schoolgirl. Because she was with other well-known, famous people she didn’t have to feel like she was on display.
The condo that Oprah secured for her in Atlanta was also right on time, such a blessing. It was clear that once she had the stroke in 2005 she could not have remained at our home in Vine City. The steps were a barrier, and it would have been extremely difficult to make the house wheelchair accessible because of the way it was built. The condo, which had an elevator, provided her a place where she could feel well cared-for and every morning, awaken to a beautiful sunrise.
About nine months after Mom passed, it hit me that the very woman I had been looking at all my life was my spiritual mentor. She was more than a mother. She lived the principles she practiced. It wasn’t “Do as I say, not as I do.” It was like she poured out an ethical pattern before us, a pattern of excellence and honesty. We could choose it or not choose it, but it was there in front of our faces. For years, I kept searching and searching, but I could never connect with anyone. And then it hit me—I’d already connected with my mother. Even though she was not a preacher, she was a true minister, a true servant of God, a true woman of God. When I had to preach, Mom would call me and say, “Baby, how you feeling?” I’d reply with the usual: “I don’t have anything to say. I’m struggling.” And she would say, “Your dad would say that too. But when you open up your mouth, God will speak through you. He will use you.” Then she would pray with me. And she was right. Every time.
Bernice A. King is the fourth and last born child of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. She is a graduate of Spelman College and holds Master of Divinity and Doctor of Law degrees from Emory University. In 2012, she became CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
The Making of Her Memoir
by
REV. DR. BARBARA REYNOLDS
I first met Coretta King in 1975 when I wrote a cover story about her for the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, where I worked as a reporter. I was startled, even amazed, when she called me personally to agree to my request for a series of interviews for that story. Only seven years had passed since Dr. King’s assassination. To spend time with the widow of such a man was journalistic ecstasy.
I was also puzzled that she was so amenable to being interviewed by me, because I had recently written a hard-hitting book about a former King aide, the Rev. Jesse Jackson (Jesse Jackson: America’s David). In those days, it was virtually a sin for a black journalist to write anything but flattering pieces about black leaders, leaders who already caught so much hell from whites. Breaking the black code could mean being smeared as an Uncle Tom, a CIA agent, an FBI spy, or even a spurned lover. After I wrote that book about Jesse Jackson, I got hit with all those responses, plus death threats, plus a few influential people pressuring stores to remove my book from their shelves. I was as welcome in some black circles as a skunk at a tea party.
But notwithstanding my reputation, or maybe because of it, Mrs. King called me up. “Come to Atlanta,” she said. “We are an open book here. I have nothing to hide. Just promise me you will write the truth.”
We met at the Interdenominational Theological Center, a predominantly African American seminary within walking distance from Morehouse College, where Dr. King had gone to school. There she was in a small classroom, amid boxes, some waiting to be unpacked because she was moving her office into the seminary as temporary headquarters. She was beautiful, graceful, even regal, but she greeted me with down-home Magnolia Blossom charm. She didn’t have a desk yet, but her vision for what would become the King Center was not encumbered by her surroundings. She showed me the blueprints for the Center, a multimillion-dollar structure that she envisioned as a kind of international West Point of nonviolence.
Pondering the enormity of her goals, I asked, “How are you going to do all that? Do you know anyone else who has done something like this? Where are you going for help?”
Looking me straight in the eye, she said, “Yes, I do know someone who will help me. The Holy Spirit will guide me.”
The Holy Spirit? I was not the ordained minister or seminary professor I am today. I was a “just the facts, please” kind of journalist. I wanted specifics I could sink my teeth into, not an introduction to an invisible entity I couldn’t interview.
But from that encounter a thirty-year relationship began. Over the decades, I peppered her with questions, some I am now embarrassed to have asked. Here was a woman who engaged with presidents, prime ministers, princes, and premiers on a regular basis who took time not only to answer my questions but to respond so convincingly that I came to share her values. Why nonviolence? At first, it didn’t make sense to me. How was it possible to love evil, mean-spirited people? How could she say that suffering was ever redemptive? And why did blacks have to be the ones to suffer? Eventually, she became my friend, mentor, and teacher—my chief explainer and interpreter of complex ideals.
For a very long time, though, from the seventies to the nineties, I didn’t know I was writing her memoir. Initially, I was covering King Center events for the newspaper. If there was an event at the Center, she’d call me and say, “Why don’t you come?” Later, I traveled with her as a reporter, including her in coverage at USA Today, where I was an editor, in a radio broadcast I did at Radio One, and in my commentaries and columns for other media. After a while, I traveled with her as a friend, to her family reunions, to events at the Kennedy Center, and so on. During those travels, too, I would take notes, record bits and pieces of what she had said, not necessarily toward a particular piece of writing, but as a way of trying to understand the inner workings of her heart and soul. Meanwhile, it turned out, she was also having an effect on me. When I was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, she made regular calls to see what, if anything, I was learning. Sometimes our conversation would not end until I heard a steady hum signaling that she had dozed off to sleep. On other calls, she would continue to challenge me to discard some of my not-so-Christian beliefs and to understand the principles of nonviolence. Years later, I became a minister. But before I started hanging around with Mrs. King, I wasn’t much of a Christian. Once, I was traveling with her on a Sunday and when she asked if I was ready for church, I said, “Mrs. King, do I have to go?”
As friends we toured places in Alabama where only a few years before neither one of us would have been safe from racial violence. In Marion, Alabama, we relaxed on the porch with her parents, Bernice and Obie Scott. Her fath
er was in his eighties then and still operated a one-pump gas station and a country store. The Scott family owned land that went farther than the eye could see. I’ve always thought that coming from landowning people contributed to Coretta’s innate sense of independence. I also traveled with her to the Hippocrates, an upscale Florida spa, where we ate raw vegetables for a week and drank terrible-tasting grass smoothies. As soon as I got out of her sight at the airport, I scarfed down all the chips and cookies in my reach. When I visited Atlanta, I often stayed in the Kings’ family guest room, down the hall from Coretta’s bedroom, where jam-packed file folders occupied the space on the bed once reserved for her beloved Martin.
I wish I could say I knew she was grooming me for the task of working on her memoir. I didn’t know. And that tells you something about who she was. She had a gentle touch, a smooth flow. She could help people and events evolve without anyone understanding the dynamics of the change until it was done. Around 1997, it just seemed natural when this woman who had become my friend and mentor turned to me to help her write her book. That is when we really got serious. We had our lawyers draw up a contract.
She had access to a condominium in a nearby Atlanta suburb. On some weekends and during my vacation time, I would meet her there. We would literally lock ourselves in, not taking calls. A chef would prepare all-vegan meals. I always packed candy and chips, so when she wasn’t looking I could distance myself from her healthy eating.
Our meetings had a routine. At the start, she would pull out her Bible, The Daily Word, and My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers, an early-twentieth-century Scottish Baptist and Holiness Movement evangelist, and she would lead a discussion with me, challenging me to dig deeper into the messages in those readings. Then our other work would begin. I had an outline for each session, but Mrs. King rarely stayed on point. We would start at A, and if the spirit moved her we would hit D, forgetting about anything in between.
Our meetings were never unruly or disrespectful, but they were sometimes frustrating. Her memories were strong and detailed, but I thought she sometimes used her gifts to share material that was off the point; she criticized me for being heavy-handed and not gracious enough. She was helping me to grow internally until I could rise to the challenge of understanding the vital, utmost relationship she had as a Christian. If I did not ask her the tough, even painful questions, I would fail her as a journalist, but if I approached her journey only on a secular level, I would fail her in a different way.
Sometimes I remember asking the wrong question at the wrong time and in the wrong way. For example, one time we had just come out of Ebenezer Church. We had heard a good sermon, and Mrs. King was in good spirits. And in response to a news article, I asked her if she thought Dr. King was faithful to her marriage vows. She looked at me crestfallen, saying, “Barbara?” My abrupt question clearly deflated her momentarily. I felt bad about the timing, so I changed the subject, went into damage control, and waited for another day. I did ask her about that on another day; she gave me an answer, and that answer is in the book.
It is my feeling that she agonized over the issue of when her memoirs should be published. And I sometimes thought that, perhaps subconsciously, she was delaying the publication until after her demise. On the one hand, she wanted a document that would inspire future generations for leadership; on the other hand, she wanted people to know there is no crown without a cross to carry, no gain without pain. That meant exposing her own flaws as well as her successes. This also meant identifying people who she felt had attempted to sabotage her institution-building or even the moral underpinnings of the Dream. As someone who moved on a plane of seeing past flaws to find virtue, it felt more natural to her to resist unflattering critiques. There are some things in this book I believe she did not want said in her lifetime.
Her favorite slogan was “Be ashamed to die until you have won a victory for humanity,” a quote from Horace Mann, the founding president of Antioch College, where she had been a student. She often said those words aloud. And what so amazed me is that she actually meant them. Many times she put her life on the line. When her house was bombed in 1955 during the Montgomery bus boycott, her father and Dr. King’s father demanded that she take her infant and go back to Atlanta. She refused. She knew if she left, Dr. King would follow. If that had happened, there might not have been a bus boycott nor the many victories that stemmed from it. The bombings all around her, the death threats against her and her loved ones, and the government harassment didn’t stop with Montgomery, but she downplayed all the dangers to keep from piling mental stress on her four children.
Her courage fascinated me because I wanted that kind of courage but just didn’t have it. As a student I made my first trip down South to help register blacks to vote shortly after the passage of the 1965 voting rights bill. From my closed environs in Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up, I had never given thought to the possibility that my brown face could conjure enough angst in anybody that it would make them want to kill me. Yet it happened. In 1965 our group of students was chased by the KKK and a roadblock was set for us. We escaped, but during a protest march, the police came and ordered us to disperse. The only reason I did not run was because my arms were locked, trapping me with the others. Just that one brief encounter with Southern violence terrified me. The experience showed up in my night dreams and nightmares for years.
I’d had a taste of what courage looked like, and I didn’t have it. Mrs. King did. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, she was a great American hero who was willing, at any given moment and over the long haul, to give her life to set others free.
I started taping our conversations around 1975, when I wrote that story for the Tribune. I remember carrying around a bulky cassette tape recorder and a blue typewriter I’d bought at Sears to transcribe my notes. I stopped interviewing her in 2000. Over the years, I had gathered about fifty tapes of our conversations. When she passed away in 2006, it never crossed my mind to stop working on the book.
I knew the book offered history and perspectives from Mrs. King that needed to be shared. What kept Mrs. King going through the lonely days of taking the movement forward without the love of her life and with recriminations from so many around her? How did she build the King Center and organize the lobbying efforts for the Humphrey-Hawkins bill and then for the King holiday? How did she do all of this and so much more as a single mother? How could she believe that our own government had played a role in Dr. King’s assassination and not become bitter, but, rather, maintain a great love for America?
My task was not merely to sort through the words she gave me and to share the story she shared with me, but to put her memories into a rhythm with the right tone. I wanted her soul to talk to us. This task was very difficult and I will have to leave it to others to judge the result.
Also by Coretta Scott King
My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.
About the Author
CORETTA SCOTT KING was an American civil rights activist, international human rights champion, author, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., and the mother of four. Born in 1927 in Heiberger, Alabama, she died in 2006 in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. You can sign up for email updates here.
DR. BARBARA REYNOLDS is an ordained minister, a columnist, and the author of five books, including Out of Hell & Living Well: Healing from the Inside Out. She was a longtime editorial board member of USA Today, won an SCLC Drum Major for Justice Award in 1987, and was inducted into the Board of Preachers at the 29th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. International College of Ministers and Laity at Morehouse College in 2014. Visit her at www.DrBarbaraReynolds.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Introduction
1. We Don’t Have Time to Cry
2. A Sense of Belonging
3. I Have Something to Offer
4. A Brave Soldier
5. Time Itself Was Ready
6. The Winds of Change
7. I Will Never Turn Back
8. Pushed to the Breaking Point
9. I’ve Been Called by God, Too
10. So Evil Only God Could Change It
11. I Have a Dream
12. Heartbreak Knocked, Faith Answered
13. Securing the Right to Vote Was a Blood Covenant
14. Moral Concerns Know No Geographic Boundary
15. I Don’t Want You to Grieve for Me
16. With a Prayer in My Heart, I Could Greet the Morning
17. My Fifth Child
18. We Must Learn to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable
19. Injustice Anywhere Is a Threat to Justice Everywhere
20. Happy Birthday, Martin
21. Our Children
22. I Will Count It All Joy
Afterwords
BY ANDREW YOUNG, MAYA ANGELOU, JOHN CONYERS, DR. BARBARA WILLIAMS-SKINNER, MYRLIE EVERS-WILLIAMS, PATRICIA LATIMORE
My Life, My Love, My Legacy Page 41