Honoring the Life and Accomplishments of Mrs. Coretta Scott King

HONORING THE LIFE AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF MRS. CORETTA SCOTT KING -- (House of Representatives - January 31, 2006)

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his kindness in yielding. My condolences first to Yolanda and Martin the Third, and Dexter and Bernice. I come to the floor to speak of Coretta Scott King, the woman, and of Coretta, my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that we will remember Coretta as I am sure she wanted to be remembered, as a movement woman, fully engaged from the outset in the work of her husband, except it was their work.

King himself said, ``I did not bring Coretta to this work, she was there.'' These two people found each other, these southerners who went north for education, precisely because, alone and in the North with few blacks and whites who believed that they did, they were fully at one with each other.

Coretta Scott King did not come to the movement by marriage. She once herself said she was married to the movement as well as to Martin. She therefore is not like most widows of great men. Of course, she carried on his legacy, but anyone who watched how ceaselessly and magnificently she worked for the essence of his legacy, nonviolence and universal human rights, will of course understand that Coretta Scott King deserves to be remembered, in justice, for her own extraordinary work.

I cannot help but also remember Coretta the friend, the friend who I would lolly-gag on the phone and laugh and talk about any old thing, not about the movement, but any old thing, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s at the height of her movement work. The last time we spoke, we sat underneath the Lincoln Memorial in those rooms preparing to go up to unveil the marker where King gave his 1963 March on Washington speech. May she be remembered for herself and her great work.

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