Love In Action

originally published February 8, 2006

Just as I got ready to sit down and write something for Valentine’s about love, Coretta Scott King died. Reading about her life, I was struck by the part about her growing up in the rural South and as a girl picking 200 pounds of cotton on the weekend so she wouldn’t have to miss her music lessons after school. Then there was the part about how after college she went on to Boston to study music and met Martin Luther King, Jr., and after they married and he graduated, she encouraged him to return to the South, to take the pastorate in Montgomery that positioned him to be already in place to stand up and be counted when destiny called him. Included in that account of their lives together was the emphasis that growing up out of the cotton South as she did, she wasn’t just his helpmeet and handmaiden to his career. Even though she mothered four children and was the wife of an increasingly busy leader, the cause of human rights was her cause as much as his, so that after he was slain, she naturally continued to carry the mantle, in spite of the subsequent problems with the King Center she founded in Atlanta.

Those names - Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King - have already marbleized into history, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy. We say them and they sound significant, but we can no longer say why. Dr. King was a Civil Rights leader. Mrs. King was his widow. Why do we capitalize “Civil Rights,” anyway?

We tend to forget what “Civil Rights” means and what it meant to Coretta Scott King growing up in rural Alabama back before World War II and living in Montgomery at the beginning of the Civil Rights era.

It is difficult for any of us today to go back and understand what it meant in 1955 when Ms. Rosa Parks decided on the spur of the moment that, no, she was just not going to get up one more time and move to the back of that bus. At the time of her recent death, I heard her voice on National Public Radio recounting that moment, and she sounded so bright and unassuming and human, saying that she was in a hurry to get to work and surely wasn’t looking for trouble, but that all of a sudden, she had just had enough. We can’t go back there and realize what that lone woman in that segregated city risked by her action.

We know that when the African-American citizens of Montgomery decided that they, too, had had enough, Dr. King stepped forward and became their leader. We know he did so with his wife sharing the burden and the danger. Their home was bombed. He was arrested. She knew he could be killed. Their cause prevailed there in Montgomery in the deep South in the 1950s, and it made him a leader and pumped up the Civil Rights movement all over the South. And there were many more marches, with Mrs. King often by his side. We cannot, even looking at those old videotapes and photographs, go back to those times and understand the fear they felt and the loathing they elicited among the people their cause challenged, people holding tightly to a way of life built on the understanding that African-Americans were and should be second-class citizens, riding in the back of the bus, attending inferior schools, unable to vote in our democratic elections, working the menial jobs, usually without even the benefit of Social Security, saying “Yes, Sir” and “No, Ma’am” to every white person they encountered, no matter what their relative levels of stature and attainment.

But to the extent that we can go back and try to understand those times, we can catch a glimpse of why those college students in Greensboro, NC, risked their lives by sitting down at a segregated lunch counter and refusing to move. We can catch a hint of why so many African-Americans all over the South were willing to sit in and march and demand equality even at the risk of being beaten and murdered.

And they were beaten; and they were murdered. And when you see them, say, in Selma, preparing to march across the bridge in the face of a violently angry mob of white people who set dogs on them and police who beat them viciously, you can maybe see a glimmer of why we capitalize the Civil Rights Movement and you know why Dr. King spoke so often of death, because he and Mrs. King and all their fellow marchers weren’t just out on a lark; they were looking into the eye of death because they believed they were right and that the time had come to fight for the right and not let anybody turn them around, back to the way things used to be. That’s love in action, and it won’t hurt us this Valentine’s Day to be reminded of the real thing and that the struggle for human rights is just as important today as it was in 1955.

Pete McCommons, Editor & Publisher editor@flagpole.com

Pete McCommons, Editor & Publisher

editor@flagpole.com