Last year she suffered a stroke and a heart attack and now she's passed away. She was up there in the years however this absolutely shocked me. She was Dr. Martin Luther King's widow. She leaves behind four children.When I first came to Morehouse I ran into her a couple of times. I'm not joking she was at a crown forum if I remember correctly and then I sat a couple of rows in front of her at Sister's Chapel over at Spelman. No one can say she didn't make her rounds. I didn't speak to her though I might have been both too nervous and perhaps it would have been presumptuous.
Oh yeah this picture I just uploaded was linked from FOXNews.com it was at the funeral of her husband with daughter Bernice in her lap.
Coretta Scott King, 78, Dies from FOXNews.com
1 comment:
I will never forget the night we found out that Doctor King died.
I was eight years old and we were at home with our neighbor Ethel who was baby sitting.
Ethel was Negro, as were 99.95% of our neighbors in Chatham in Chicago in 1968 - excluding religious - but to us she was Ethel the older girl who lived downstairs and babysat and let us watch Dark Shadows when we came home from school, which we were not supposed to watch, but she loved it too.
Of course then we were barely aware of racial differences, when you are those ages you are color blind unless you are hit over the head by them, you accept your world the way it is constructed as normal and come to know and love the people around you as they are.
I remember watching television Ethel and my siblings (7,4,2) when the newsflash came on about Dr. King and we all started crying. Ethel of course, knew the most about how tragic his death was, and most moved, but my younger brother and I knew why we were crying because my father had been in the south with Dr. King's marchers on al least two occaisions and had brought back silent home movies from inside the March on Montgomery which are as powerful today as they were then.
We had seen Dr. King on the news and had listened to him and could not understand why anyone would find what he longed for and dreamed for unreasonable.
When he was killed, it was like a personal attack on someone close to us, even more so seeing Ethel cry so, which made the younger two cry too.
I also remember feeling so sad for his wife and children, especially the children who seemed young too.
One of my first sad television memories was seeing John John Kennedy on TV saluting his father's coffin and thinking that we were the same age and feeling sad for him, and I remember feeling that there was something wrong with the world if something like this could happen again, and if our own parents were safe from harm. It was the first time I had really wondered about that, the first time I had ever considered mortality closely and it had a profound effect on me.
It also made me angry. I understand that I was not alone in this. But I think it is worth noting that the African-American community was not alone in their pain and anger that day. And that some of those affected were very young, and carried the sense of the wrongness of racism, hatred, and murder with them the rest of thier lives.
The death of Corretta Scott King saddens many today, but her life after her husband's martyrdom was one of strength, and courage, and selflessness that would be hard to match. Let us remember in our sadness that she believed that in the end, after all her hard work in this world, that today she would be reunited with her husband, who would certainly be as proud and as greatful as anyone could be for what she did to work towards the fulfillment of his dreams.
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Levois,
Thanks so much for your condolences on the loss of my long time friend from childhood. His loss is a tough one, but the prayer support from so many has meant a lot.
Thanks.
Peter
Over the years I have not
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