My mother has been out of town, so I cooked dinner for my father last night. We talked about his old friend, Coretta Scott1.
My father and Coretta went to school together at Antioch. They became friends while working on an early effort to desegregate Yellow Springs, Ohio2. It nearly got my father kicked out of school3. Coretta was among those who forced the administration to back down from that threat.
"I didn't learn my commitment from Martin. We just converged at a certain time."
Though Coretta was quoted in her obituaries saying that she was committed to civil rights before meeting Martin, the particulars of what she brought to their marriage went largely unremarked this week. When Coretta met Martin, she was already an activist and an organizer. She had already led a civil rights campaign, using non-violent action. She was already a pacifist. Martin’s pacifism and commitment to non-violence, while certainly deeply held and independently arrived at, owed a great deal of its later practical application to his wife’s experience in organizing such campaigns. They were partners.
When Coretta moved to Boston to study music, my father was moving to Boston to study history. When Coretta agreed to marry Martin, my father arranged the engagement party. Imagine a party today of theologians, musicians, and Antioch bred activists; Episcopalians and Quakers and Baptists and Jews; blacks and whites; young men and women on their way up in the world and who weren’t willing to leave anyone behind.
My father’s fondest, clearest, and teariest memory of Coretta was of a few years earlier. They were both doing a term of work study (“cooperative education”) in the New York area, my father working as an apprentice cartographer with a firm of economic forecasters. He invited her to his parents’ home in the Bronx for dinner. His cousin, living next door, was recruited to play the piano and my father, my grandparents, and Coretta sang.
. . .
1 I’m a child of the Movement. Both my parents knew Coretta in different contexts before they ever met. In our home we always spoke of Coretta and Martin (and all the others) by their first names.
2 In the history of the civil rights movement, Yellow Springs is best known for the polarizing 1964 efforts to desegregate Gegner’s barbershop. By that time, Yellow Springs had come a long way, even employing a black chief of police. In the early 1950s, when Coretta and my father attended Antioch College, Yellow Springs was not much different than any other town in southern Ohio.
3 Yes, Antioch College, commitment to social justice and all, tried to kick my father out for his involvement in a campaign for civil rights. Of course they offered a different, and seemingly less controversial, reason: the administration claimed my father was "ineducable". I see that scrolled beneath the family arms.
Posted by Martial