Born to daringly enterprising parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott (1927-2006) had always felt a special calling.

While enrolled as one of the first Black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College in Ohio, she became politically and socially active and committed to the peace movement.

As a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music, determined to pursue her own career as a concert singer, she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But, in love and devotion to shared Christian beliefs as well as shared racial and economic justice goals, she married Dr. King, and a cascade of events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard-bearer, and so much more.

As a widow and single mother of four, she worked tirelessly to develop the King Center as a citadel for world peace; lobbied for fifteen years for a U.S. national holiday in honor of her husband; championed women’s, workers’, and gay rights; and was a powerful international voice for nonviolence, freedom, and human dignity.

Coretta’s is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an extraordinary Black woman in twentieth-century America―a brave leader who, in the face of terrorism and violent hatred, stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful every day of her life.