Remembering the Kings' Boston connection
BOSTON --A plaque on a Massachusetts Avenue apartment building marks an overlooked but important milestone in Martin Luther King's life. It was here, far from the civil rights battlegrounds of the deep south, that King lived when he met his future wife.
Coretta Scott King, who worked to secure her husband's legacy following his 1968 assassination, died in her sleep and was found by her daughter early Tuesday, according to a family friend. She was 78.
King received her undergraduate degree in music and education from Antioch College in Ohio, then moved to Boston to study voice and violin at the New England Conservatory of Music, planning to pursue a singing career.
A friend introduced her to a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, who was working toward a doctorate in theology at Boston University.
"She said she wanted me to meet a very promising young minister from Atlanta," King once said, adding with a laugh, "I wasn't interested in meeting a young minister at that time."
She recalled that on their first date he told her: "You know, you have everything I ever wanted in a woman. We ought to get married someday."
Eighteen months later -- on June 18, 1953 -- they did, at her parents' home in Marion, Ala.
Boston resident and conservatory graduate Florence Dunn, who occasionally played piano during King's voice lessons, remembers the day she came to class with her engagement ring.
"'You'll be so busy as a minister's wife you'll have no time for singing,'" Dunn remembered the teacher saying.
"We didn't know what was coming, of course."
Coretta King graduated in 1954; her husband completed his degree the following year, and they left Boston to return to the South, where Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.
Coretta Scott King came back to Boston in 1971 to accept an honorary doctorate from her alma mater. In 2004, the 50th anniversary of her graduation, she told conservatory graduates that she was inspired by the music of the civil rights movement.
"Over the years, I have learned a lot about the power of music and song to fill the hearts of millions with hope and courage," she said then.
Ida Lewis, a 1956 BU graduate who now teaches journalism there, knew both Kings. She said the thing she most admired about Coretta Scott King was how she took up her husband's fight, "heralding the things that he stood for."
"She was the consciousness of the movement after Martin Luther King passed on," she said.
But the Kings' links to Boston weren't all happy.
In the early 1990s, Coretta Scott King sued Boston University to recover thousands of documents from early in her husband's career, which he'd given to his alma mater 30 years earlier.
She wanted them added to the rest of his archives in Atlanta, arguing that Martin Luther King only gave the papers to BU for safekeeping, and later changed his mind. But a jury sided with BU, and the papers remain a part of the university archives.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said in a statement Tuesday that King was "A driving force, not just for the civil rights movement, but for the great march toward progress."
