Happy Birthday to civil rights leader, activist, and writer Coretta Scott King (b. April 27, 1927, in Heiberger, AL), whose dedicated work for human rights extended across and beyond the United States. From a young age, this included fighting for racial equality, women’s rights, labor rights, world peace, and more. She saw all of these movements as part of a singular shared human struggle that she called “the Beloved Community.” She wrote, “To me, the Beloved Community is a spiritual bond that claims the energies and commitment of a diverse group of people who desire to serve a cause larger than themselves. The Beloved Community is fueled by unconditional love, feels like family, and transcends race, religion, and class.” Reflecting on building this understanding in college she wrote, “At Antoich [College], long before I could explain it, I began to put flesh on the skeleton of my thinking about such an ideal, and the education I received and the connections I made prepared me, more than anything else, to be a part of one of the greatest human rights movements of the twentieth century.”
Citations: Rachel Jessica Daniel, “Coretta Scott King: Icon as Activist,” in It’s Our Movement Now: Black Women’s Politics and the 1977 National Women’s Conference, eds. Laura L. Lovett, Rachel Jessica Daniel, and Kelly N. Giles (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022), 25, 31-32, Kindle edition; Coretta Scott King and Barbara Reynolds, Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 23, Kindle edition; “Program from a Mrs. Coretta Scott King recital on September 30, 1956,” program (Montgomery, AL, September 30, 1956), public domain, https://www.si.edu/object/program-mrs-coretta-scott-king-recital-september-30-1956:nmaahc_2016.90.5.2.
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