A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

Coretta Scott King was an influential activist and organizer, and while she has been remembered most as a wife to Martin Luther King Jr., her civil rights work was very influential to and beyond her husband. She was an accomplished student, musician, and a member of campus NAACP and student committees and organizations for civil rights. Even while taking on the domestic responsibilities of their household, she was her husband’s most steadfast support system in Montgomery while the family faced violent racist backlash in their community. She was a particularly outspoken opponent to the Vietnam War and urged her husband to be more public on the matter as well. Her education on global peace movements exceeded her husband’s.

She also promoted economic justice and welfare rights. After her husband’s death, Scott King assumed many of his organizing commitments and continued to speak publicly at antiwar demonstrations, welfare rights meetings, and, in later decades, on gay rights. During her public career, male civil rights activists advised that she assume a lesser role and dial back her public activity, but she steadily refused. She expressed discontentment with the chauvinistic treatment of women in the movement during her career. Scott King died in 2006.

Martin Luther King Jr. is perhaps the best-known and most celebrated figure of the civil rights movement. A minister and talented orator, King emerged as the spokesman for nonviolent activism in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was one of the main organizers and overseers of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and became the first leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Committee. King published and spoke frequently about civil rights and the many systemic issues Black Americans faced, although his most famous enduring work ruminates on the power of love and positive outlooks, like his “I Have a Dream” speech from the March on Washington in 1963.

As important as King was to the civil rights movement, Theoharis explains how the public misremembers him. During King’s lifetime, many commentators saw him as dangerously radical and a national security threat, and white people did not flock to his side to carry out a major societal revolution. King has become a symbol of successful, nonviolent activism for a just cause—but an impossible and distorted standard against which modern-day activists are continually measured. In truth, King was radical, disruptive, and committed to many issues of injustice (including economic) and critiques of American domestic and foreign policy.