While I was in Detroit, I of course stopped at a used bookstore. Bookstores are my DOWNFALL. I am scared to even think of the thousands upon thousands of dollars that I have spent on books over the years. Anyway, this bookstore had a set of Jet Magazines from the 60s on sale. I could not pass them up. I just couldn’t. They used to cost 20 cents. So great. Anyway, in the Feb 18 1965 edition, the magazine features an interview with Coretta Scott King as she was left Atlanta to visit her husband who was jailed in Selma. Here is the story:

Leaving her Atlanta home to visit her husband in the Selma jail, Mrs. Coretta King talked freely with JET about the possibility that she might be arrested.

“I have never been arrested before. I really feel, sometimes, a little bit — shall I say, deprived of the experience of going to jail. I want to have that experience. Many times, in a spiritual sense I’ve experienced it, but not physically. It would help to strengthen my own convictions. I have often talked to him (Dr. King) about going to jail. He has agreed to it, but has always felt that the time was not right — often because of the children.

“I first wanted to go to jail when we were in India (in 1959) and I learned that so many Indian women had been to jail in their struggle. (King has patterned his public actions after Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi.) So few of us (women) in the U.S. had been to jail at that time. Learning how many of those persons went and stayed for long periods and meeting older people who knew Gandhi made me realize that if I didn’t go to jail during this revolution, I will have missed something.”

Contemplating arrest in Selma, she concluded: “Since I haven’t gone (to jail) before, this is as good a time as any — perhaps the best since I grew up in Alabama — to suffer for my people…in Alabama, on the soil of Alabama.

Like almost all of the wives of Civil Rights leaders and icons, Coretta Scott was a fascinating, accomplished, and still unknown person in her own right. I once attended a talk given by Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall about Coretta Scott at UIC. Later, I was privileged to go to dinner with Dr. Guy-Sheftall and several others. During the talk and then at dinner, Beverly shared stories about Coretta Scott’s upbringing, her own activism before she met MLK, and her passions after his murder. Unfortunately, Coretta Scott King’s odious children have refused to make their mother’s papers accessible to researchers. Therefore her real legacy is mostly still obscured from public view.

Coretta Scott was apparently speaking out in support of gay rights as early as the 1970s. Yet her daughter, Bernice, TODAY proudly exhibits her homophobic bigotry. Coretta Scott was the valedictorian of her high school class, she attended Antioch college for a time and became a member of the NAACP while a student there. She had the word “obey” removed from her vows when she married Martin Luther King in 1953. During her marriage, she subsumed her own ambitions to support him in his work because she felt that what he was doing was so important. However, as you can tell from the JET piece quoted above, she struggled with the fact that she wasn’t able to take a more active role in nonviolent resistance (putting her actual body on the line for the cause). Her husband wanted her at home taking care of the children.

Coretta Scott lived many years past 1968 when her husband was tragically assassinated. She died in 2006 and she spent all of the years post 1968 speaking out against war, nuclear weapons, homophobia, Apartheid and so much more. I sincerely hope that Dr. Guy-Sheftall is one day able to complete a book on this remarkable woman’s life. Her children are unfortunate proof that sometimes apples do fall far, far from the trees.