By Michael Meyers
mmeyers@nypress.com

The biggest and gentlest voice of the Civil Rights movement is gone. Coretta Scott King, Martin’s widow, is dead at 78, a victim of two Big Cs—cancer and change. 

There was a time—up until the assassination of Martin L. King, Jr. in 1968—when the most harmonious of voices was also the strongest and bravest. A classical singer by training, Scott King surely understood the power of modulation and the appeal of harmony. When she spoke, her words were always measured with credibility and plain sense, with respect for her audience and for herself, with compassion, not just passion—and with conviction of the heart in harmony with her soul.

Coretta took up the mantle of civil rights leader at a time when black males were rushing to grab Dr. King’s crown of fame and purpose. Jesse Jackson waved a blood-stained shirt in a farce to garner media attention. Other young blacks, who’d once followed and worshipped King, broke off in anger and frustration into sects and charades of black power, forsaking integration for identity politics, and non-violence for “by any means necessary” militancy.

It was an open secret in 1968 that Dr. King has been finished as a dominant, unifying civil-rights leader. Like Malcolm X, he’d been subject to FBI harassment and to betrayal by race fanatics from within his own ranks. Coretta knew about this treachery, but she kept faith with King, Jr.’s non-violent philosophy anyway, carrying it all the way into the 21st century. It was a daunting venture—placing “non-violent” in the name of the memorial center she established to keep her husband’s dream alive was a bold act in those turbulent years, when black extremists were shouting, “Look out whitey, black power’s gonna git your mama.”

Looking backwards, we can be ashamed for the lost, stolen and strayed souls of angry black folk who got downright mean-spirited about social change, for those of all races who betrayed Dr. King’s wishes and renounced integrationist and affirmative-action campaigns. But we can only admire the widow who wiped off her tears and went to work to ensure that the best of her husband’s legacy was kept alive in the hearts and minds of Americans of good will.  

With the King Center for Non-Violent Social Change, Scott King, a woman in an angry black man’s world, stood up to the black militants—talking the talk of moderation and walking the walk of her late husband, unafraid to advocate for human—and not just civil—rights. She advocated for the end of apartheid in South Africa and America, and to incorporate women’s rights into America’s civil-rights struggles. 

To just about everyone’s dismay, she was not perfect. She curiously took up the cause of James Earl Ray, her husband’s adjudicated assassin; and she allowed the board of the King Center to be dominated by family members, and the Center itself to be run by her and Martin’s two sons, one of whom, Dexter, ran the Center, located in Atlanta, from his home base in Malibu, California. 

Nice gig if you can keep it; and as long as the non-profit King Center’s board was family-run, it was a safe job. But the King Center fell into both physical and spiritual disarray when an aging and heartbroken mother was unable to impose sanity, much less discipline, on such a chaotic, dysfunctional family feud. To survive, the King Center may be taken over by the federal government. Lord, no.

And no doubt, the imperfect Coretta Scott King is to blame for having retained and exercised so vigorously copyright and licensing control over her dead husband’s intellectual works—including over his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. But that income-producing rigor is what kept the King family out of the poor house. Martin L. King, Jr., in stark contrast to many a money-grubbing preacher and civil-rights leader today, was not a wealthy man. Martin was not cut from the same garb of the modern-day steak-eating ministers, who’ve grown fat and rich off of prayer clothes, instant miracles and paid service on corporate boards. 

Nor was Martin suited to skimming the cream of government largesse or selling his congregation to the highest bidder among those politicians who sought to barter votes for “access.” 

King, Jr. did not exchange his vows with God for the ponderous platitudes and deals that today’s preachers offer up in exchange for vouchers for their church schools and ghetto-gilding building funds gussied up as faith-based initiatives. 

Martin’s dream has been spoiled by the pretenders and the shakiest handlers this side of heaven, including some of his own former lieutenants, like NAACP chair Julian Bond, who recently told a “Black History Month” audience at Fayetteville State University that “The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side.” Wow.               

It wasn’t the first time that one of King’s apostles had disgraced himself and his King. Jesse Jackson has done so plenty of times —remember Hymietown? Then there’s the fanaticism of Myrlie Evers and Kweisi Mfume—Bond’s predecessors at the helm of the NAACP, who, at an NAACP Convention, called the NAACP’s critics “rats” and “snakes.” 

The self-professed adherents of Dr. King have largely substituted whining for advocacy, partisanship for disinterested politics, and nagging cynicism for abiding faith in humankind’s generosity of spirit. 

Still, I doubt that Coretta Scott King would have taken to task these crudest claimants to her husband’s civil-rights crown. She was not built that way. She was more charitable towards others, especially her lessers, than they are to the rest of us. Coretta was not a shouter, even though sometimes she got caught up in the racial unity trap, which is the only explanation for her discretion in not opposing openly and directly the men who have forsaken her husband’s dream of racial harmony, and instead pursue the trap of racial unity and rhetoric. 

No one bothers to copyright rhetoric about “rats” and “snakes” and “Nazis,” let alone memorialize it.  Why and how is it that the big media, big foundations, big corporations and the biggest of donors favor this kind of tomfoolery perpetrated by supposed civil-rights leaders in pursuit of headlines, notoriety and more money for their vanity and causes? Do these powerful institutions intend for buffoons to represent forever a beleaguered people? Do they care that these people deserve better than Pied Pipers of rats and rodents?

Coretta Scott King was a class act; the kind of caring and decent human being who in saner times might have been raised up by us as a mass leader more worthy than the kind we have been given, accorded by those who choose and prop up mediocre and embarrassing black leadership. Why couldn’t we have had Coretta Scott King in lieu of Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond? Rats!