How Coretta Scott King Leveraged MLK’s Legacy to Fight for Gay Rights

“I once told Martin that although I loved being his wife and a mother, if that was all I did I would have gone crazy. I felt a calling on my life from an early age. I knew I had something to contribute to the world.” Coretta Scott King, quietly known as the First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement, is most famous for being her husband’s wife. She’s seen in photos more than she’s ever heard in video. She’s remembered as elegant, demure, classy, perhaps even stoic in her strength.

Despite, as King biographer Clayborne Carson once put it, being “more politically active at the time they met than Martin was,” she’s often more discussed for her iconic Jackie Kennedy level wardrobe than for leading more than 50,000 marchers through the streets of Memphis just four days after her husband’s assassination. Three of her four children were by her side.

On the most famous day of Dr. King’s legacy, the 1963 March on Washington, Coretta Scott King sat silently in the second row. According to the Smithsonian’s oral history of the march, she was mentioned only once that day, in passing, despite a lifetime of investment in racial justice dating back to her teens. As a college student she was a member of the NAACP and the Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees. In his early letters to her, Martin noted that his first attraction to Coretta was her political mind. He thought of their love as a partnership.

That partnership wasn’t always equal. Much like the other women who were, by Scott King’s own estimation, the “backbone of the whole civil rights movement,” she was expected to work in shadows. Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer and so many more have only recently begun to be given their proper due in history. For Scott King, the process of coming to the public light began in the days after her husband died.

Coretta Scott King with her children at the funeral service of Martin Luther King, Jr.

On April 8, 1968, four days after Dr. King’s death in Memphis, Coretta Scott King flew to the place of his murder and lead a protest memorial in a black lace headscarf. She’s reported to have said, “I need to go finish his work. I’ve been with him as a partner on all these other marches and confrontations. I feel like I need to go.” Her eulogy at his funeral was televised to more than 120 million people. Three weeks later, she delivered his planned speech at a protest against the Vietnam War in New York’s Central Park. Two months after that, she led the Poor People’s March to Washington in her husbands name. King had originally conceived the march in hopes of forcing the US government to confront the realities of American poverty. Coretta’s analysis highlighted intersections of class, race, and gender that often kept black women poor and undervalued.

She went on to become the first woman to preach at Great Britain’s St. Paul’s Cathedral and the first woman to deliver the class day address at Harvard University. She created the Full Employment Action Council and the Coalition of Conscience, two governing bodies that brought religious organizations, businesses, and human rights groups together to work in favor of national policies on access and equality. She founded the Martin Luther King Jr Center for Nonviolent Social Change, a cornerstone of her and her husband’s lasting legacy. For Scott King, an key part of that legacy was carrying King’s name into the fight for LGBT equality.

In 1983, on the 20th anniversary of her husband’s March on Washington, Scott King pledged her support for the Gay and Civil Rights Act that was then before congress. The groundbreaking bill would have prohibited discrimination against gays and lesbians in housing, employment, and other public accommodations protected by federal policy. When questioned about this turn in her activism, Scott King reminded naysayers that many gays and lesbians had given their all to the civil rights movement (including perhaps most famously Bayard Rustin, an openly gay black man and lead organizer of the 1963 March on Washington). She felt it was her duty to offer support in return. Later that year, Scott King purposefully made space for black lesbian poet Audre Lorde at the march’s anniversary rally. The good Lorde spoke:

Today’s march openly joins the black civil rights movement and the gay civil rights movement in the struggles we have always shared, the struggle for jobs, for health, for peace and for freedom. We marched in 1963 with Dr. Martin Luther King and dared to dream that freedom would include us, because not one of us is free to choose the terms of our living until all of us are free to choose the terms of our living. 

In the mid-1980s, when President Ronald Reagan wouldn’t even acknowledge the disease, Scott King – with the help of her assistant Lynn Cothren, an openly gay man — used the King Center to create a welcoming environment for the LGBT community, especially queer black people who were suffering in the middle of a generational genocide from HIV/AIDS. After the death of a close gay friend, she hosted a day of memorial at the Center and encouraged participants to sew stitches on a panel that would become part of the AIDS memorial quilt.

In 1986, in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that there was no constitutional right to engage in homosexual sex, Scott King accepted an invitation to be a featured speaker at the September 27, 1986 New York Gala for the Human Rights Campaign Fund. In 1993, she held a press conference urging President Clinton to end the ban on gays serving in the military. In 1994, she stood with Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative Barney Frank as they introduced the Employment Non-Discrimation Act (ENDA), which among other things would have prohibited workplace discrimination on the the basis of sexual orientation.

On March 31st 1998, at the 25th Anniversary luncheon for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, King spoke out against strands of conservatism in black communities that had kept some members reluctant to join the gay rights movement. She stated, “I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice… but I hasten to remind that Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.”

The next day, April 1st 1998, at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, she added: “Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood.” She echoed these sentiments time and again until her passing.

In 2004, during the middle of a heated national debate on same-sex marriage and a proposed constitutional amendment endorsed by President George W Bush that would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman, Coretta Scott King spoke out again. She called the proposed amendment tantamount to “gay bashing.”

While her eldest daughter, Yolanda King, took up Coretta’s mantle of activism for gay rights, her youngest daughter, Bernice King chose a different path. In the middle of the same 2004 debate for marriage rights, the younger King besmirched that her father “did not take a bullet for same-sex marriage.”

In part these comments fueled a fire between the King siblings, pitting Yolanda and Dexter against the more conservative Martin Luther King III and Bernice. After their mother’s passing in 2006, the siblings fought over the sale of the King Center in Atlanta. The dispute was ultimately settled by Yolanda’s untimely passing due to complications from a chronic heart condition in 2007. Currently, Bernice King remains the CEO of the Center.

Still, the legacy of Coretta Scott King’s lifetime commitment to the hard work of social justice cannot be overturned. Last year on Martin Luther King Day, I reflected that the work of justice never ends. The only way forward is for everyone to roll up their sleeves and fight another day. It’s uncomfortable, off-putting, and absolutely necessary. No one better embodied that message than Coretta Scott King, who spent the 40 years after her husband’s passing not laying back and honoring him peacefully. Instead, she fought every day. And for those last 20 years? She fought for US.

Coretta Scott King understood how she was best remembered, that many were satisfied to consider her a relic of the past. She then turned that legacy on its head, “I am made to sound like an attachment to a vacuum cleaner, the wife of Martin, then the widow of Martin, all of which I was proud to be. But I was never just a wife, nor a widow. I was always more than a label.” She leveraged the weight of her husbands name and, in the true spirit of an ally, never asked for a thank you or a spotlight as she hefted that name in our corner so that we could build on his good work.

I cannot think of a better memorial for her husband than to honor her today.

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Carmen Phillips

Carmen is Autostraddle's Editor-in-Chief and a Black Puerto Rican femme/inist writer. She claims many past homes, but left the largest parts of her heart in Detroit, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, NY. There were several years in her early 20s when she earnestly slept with a copy of James Baldwin’s “Fire Next Time” under her pillow. You can find her on twitter, @carmencitaloves.

Carmen has written 692 articles for us.

25 Comments

    • I’d love that! When I was a teacher, I used Autostraddle articles for homework a few times. Glad to see the legacy continuing!

  1. Thank you for writing this Carmen! I’ve always looked up to King and Malcom and often wondered had they both lived how and when would they come to support gay rights. It’s nice to think about how King’s work with Bayard Rustin and Coretta’s own beliefs would have pushed him to support gay rights.

    Side note: I’m curious to find out if Bernice is still homophobic because in recent years she has been the most vocal supporter of social justice out of King’s kids.

  2. Thanks for writing this, Carmen! I learned tons of things that I hadn’t learned in school (surprise) and also got a reminder that women, esp black women, have done and do and will do so much for this world without a fraction of the thanks or the reward some men get, whether or not they deserve it. Even after a lifetime of activism both in tandem with her husband’s and separate, Coretta Scott King really doesn’t get the recognition she deserves, so I’m so pleased that you’re sharing this with us!

    • Carmen, I’ve been reading a lot of your pieces on Activism and Politics today and want to say Thank You for all that you put in and everything you’ve shared

  3. I really, really appreciated reading this, thank you. Amazing work and an amazing legacy from an incredible woman.

  4. “I’ve been with him as a partner on all these other marches and confrontations.”

    Their partnership moved the world forward. Coretta Scott King was a powerhouse of a woman. She was, in her own right, a force. America is lucky to have her lead the movement. We need more like her. I hope the next Mrs. King takes the rein. Until.then, I’m happy to read an article like this celebrating her legacy. ✊🏼

  5. Thank you for educating me on someone that I knew nothing about, this was very interesting reading ♥

  6. After I came out my mom was insistent that I “became” gay because I was allowed to go away to college (just 45 min) that was predominantly white because “Those white people did this to you.” Gayness was a white thing. This was a common thought throughout much of the black community. The first time I saw Ms. King had openly supported gay folk, had aligned with the NAACP to support gay folk I felt this giddy warmth throughout my body. Held on to that article for days. Printed it out and left it on my mom’s dresser. She didn’t respond. But now she knew. One of our greatest sheroes, an icon of the civil rights movement loved me was using her considerable will to serve and intellect to create justice for people like me. A woman who could have chosen to do anything be part of any revolution, chose me and mine. My gratitude to her for this and every other step she’s taken for freedom
    is bottomless.

  7. just read this but this was so good and informative! I had no idea how active she was in the lgbt community

  8. I truley believe that coretta devila i really beil the were involved in a project called black panthers black power and they couldnt beat the germans so they join them they started making the calendar were they kiled each other called black on black crime martin luther king was a minister and the was working on a project called ever lasting life born again recarnation human cloning copyrights were they marked children with lea piosoning as miss fits and called it the clause act they started members only ministry were they started human trafficking and drug trafficking and human cloning called copyrights the want to be eqaul with the germans the named thereselves the nation of islam were they practice there belief called eqaul rights based on a true story about jesus and he said revenges is mines two wrongs dont make it right 3 strikes your out king david the evil star the failing star is a contractor a mason he hes mr. Baker lgbtq hes resonsible for everything that happens to the children with lead piosoning the gov. Willcheat steel lie under oath and direspect god for him satan and his satanics.in god we trust amen

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