Yellow Springs News Online

Antioch played ‘significant role’ in life of alumna Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King returned to her alma mater, Antioch College, to deliver the commencement address during the college’s graduation ceremony. Antioch will celebrate King’s life with a series of public events on Wednesday, Feb. 15.

In 1947 a shy young African-American woman named Corrie Scott left her rural home in Alabama and came north to attend Antioch College. She was nervous about leaving home and facing the challenges of being one of the few black students at a northern college.

When she died last week at the age of 78, Coretta Scott King, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was no longer shy. Rather, she had become a world figure, a widely hailed leader and moral force for civil rights and social justice.

While last week the world mourned a woman of great courage and grace, Antioch and Yellow Springs mourned as well.

Next Wednesday, Feb. 15, the college will celebrate King’s life with a special event in her honor. A community celebration dinner will take place at 5:15 p.m. at the Antioch College cafeteria. Following the dinner, a program will include speakers Irwin Abrams, one of King’s professors at Antioch, Rev. John Freeman, Paula Treichler, Steve Schwerner and Al Denman.

Earlier in the day, a tribute of movies to King will be shown from 2 to 5 p.m. in Kelly Hall.

“Coretta Scott King was among our most distinguished alumni,” Antioch President Steven Lawry said this week. “I like to think that her time at Antioch was important to her, leaving the rural segregated South and coming to a more integrated community, perhaps giving her a sense of helping build what she and Martin Luther King Jr. called the ‘beloved community.’ ”

Lawry spoke to the News on the telephone on Monday while traveling to Atlanta to attend King’s funeral. He was one of 11 representatives from the college, he said, including several from the Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom, a new program that Antioch began last fall. The center, to which King gave her blessing last summer, promotes the college’s historical emphasis on diversity and freedom of thought.

When the center was launched, Rick Jurasek, the college’s executive vice president who was serving as interim president, said, “There is a direct connection between what Horace Mann imagined education to be and the agenda of the Coretta Scott King Center. The center will enable us to live out our mission more faithfully and in a more concentrated form.”

Lessons at Antioch
Antioch played a pivotal role in her life, King said many times. In the commencement address she gave at Antioch in 1982, King said that Antioch “played a significant role in making me what I am today.”

The years she spent at the college, she said, “were some of the most informative, challenging, stimulating, productive and rewarding years of my life. Antioch did indeed provide me with the kind of preparation, training and experiences that enabled me to stand with Martin Luther King Jr. as he stood in the forefront of the nonviolent civil and human rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s, and to stand in my own right after 1968.”

“In retrospect,” she said, “I see my Antioch education and experiences as having been the most valuable training that I could have had for my life’s work.”

Coretta Scott was an unassuming young woman, one of six African-American students, when she came to Antioch in 1946. In an article King wrote in the 1948 Journal of Negro Life, she said her parents were “respectable but poor,” with her father running a country store in Heiberger, Ala. But she found early in life, she wrote, that “being respectable did not necessarily bring respect — not in my home town.”

The only African-Americans treated with respect were teachers, King wrote, and she decided to be one. So in 1946 King followed her older sister, Edythe, to Antioch. Edythe had been the first recipient of a scholarship offered to African-Americans by the college’s Race Relations Committee, King wrote. The person most instrumental in bringing Edythe, and later Coretta, to Antioch was Jessie Treichler, then assistant to the president.

Treichler was “very dedicated to breaking the color line” at the college,” said Scott Sanders, the Antioch University archivist.

King came to Antioch as a music and education major, and her mentor was music professor Walter Anderson, according to Joan Horn, who wrote a biography on Anderson. King appreciated that at Antioch people didn’t care much about clothes, so that she didn’t have to spend the money to be fashionable, Horn said.

But King did care about clothes, said Phyllis Lawson Jackson, who was a few years older than Coretta. The Scott sisters spent weekends with Jackson’s aunt and uncle, Elmer and Christine Lawson, and Jackson recalled King as having a “warm personality, a typical teenager, always a smile.”

King was also “fastidious,” Jackson said. “She always had her hair just right and her clothes were coordinated.”

No matter how famous she became later on, King always stayed in touch with the Lawsons, sending them baby pictures and articles, Jackson said.

At Antioch, King had co-op jobs waiting tables at the Antioch Inn, as a camp counselor, as a settlement house worker in Cleveland, as a library assistant and as a student teacher, she later wrote. The work experience helped her learn to adapt to new circumstances, she said in the 1982 commencement speech.

“Antioch taught me that change is a necessary part of growth and development but that one must maintain stability in a constantly changing society,” she said. “Chaos is a concomitant of the creative process. My 26 years in the nonviolent movement have been an experience in organized chaos. Yes, Antioch taught me how to cope.”

She was surprised and inspired to find whites at Antioch who were also committed to social justice, she wrote in the 1948 Journal of Negro Life.

“For a Southerner, particularly a southern Negro, it seems to me important to find out that there really are some white people working for racial equality and to be able to work with them. I’ve learned something from them; they’ve learned something from me,” she wrote.

Discrimination in Yellow Springs
But Antioch and Yellow Springs were still a product of their time, and they were not perfect. In her commencement address, King spoke of her disappointment with Antioch when, as the first African-American to qualify for student teaching in the Yellow Springs schools, she was denied a position. She was told she could student teach in a black school in Xenia, but she refused. She appealed to the college’s president, Douglas McGregor, to appeal the decision, but he refused to stand up for her, Sanders said.

“This proved a great disappointment for me at the time, but I was determined that it would not stop me or cause me to become embittered,” King said in her commencement address. “It did not cause me to lose faith in Antioch and its efforts to integrate blacks into the educational mainstream.”

While she was barred from working in the Yellow Springs schools, King did student teach at the Antioch School.

One who remembers her from that time is David Abrams, the son of Irwin Abrams, who was in the nursery school in which King taught. She had a beautiful soprano voice and sang a special song to each child, Irwin Abrams recalled, noting that she sang the spiritual “Little David, Play on Your Harp” to his son.

According to Hardy Trolander, King did her student-teaching under his late wife, Gene Trolander.

Beloved world figure
After King left Antioch in 1951, she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and planned a singing career. But then she met the young Martin Luther King Jr., who was working on his doctorate at Boston University, and the two married 18 months later. Coretta Scott King raised the couple’s four children as her husband stood at the front of the civil rights movement.

More than a decade after she left Yellow Springs, the Antioch faculty determined that she should receive her degree from the college, and King received a BA in 1967, according to Nina Myatt, curator of the Antioch archives.

When Martin Luther King was fatally shot in 1968, Coretta Scott King was suddenly a young widow, with four children to raise alone. But she was also the keeper of her husband’s spirit and passion, and she founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, which focused on economic justice as well as civil rights.

Over the years King became not just a moral leader but a beloved world figure. Her autobiography, My Life With Martin Luther King Jr., was translated into 16 languages. She traveled extensively and was awarded more than 40 honorary doctorates.

In 2004, Antioch honored King with the Horace Mann Award. When she was saying goodbye after accepting the award, Irwin Abrams recalled, King told him, “Keep doing what you are doing.”

“While I have tried to do what she said, she has done even more than the world had expected of her in working to broaden Martin’s legacy of civil rights to human rights for everybody,” Abrams said in a statement last week after King’s death.

“I was glad to hear how President Bush praised Coretta at the beginning of his recent State of the Union speech,” Abrams said. “I listened to what he said, which I felt was sincere, and as I looked at that beautiful picture of Coretta that was shown, I had tears in my eyes. While she became a world figure, she never lost that warm personal touch, which meant so much to all of us who knew her.”