Remarks by Dr. Steven W. Lawry,
President of Antioch College,
at the Memorial Service for Coretta Scott King
Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta

February 6th, 2006

Coretta Scott enrolled in Antioch College in October 1945.  Her sister, Edythe, had started at Antioch two years earlier.  Coretta majored in music and education.  Paul Robeson performed on campus one evening and Coretta sang in the program. He was full of appreciation for her fine soprano voice. 

Opportunities to pursue higher education are much more widespread today than they were in 1945, so we may forget how transformative attending college can be—or rather should be—to the lives of young people.  Coretta was acutely aware of just how significant attending college would be for her life, coming as she did from a poor African American community in rural Alabama, and truly made the most of her time at Antioch.  Antioch, as a progressive college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, not only provided a rigorous education, but inserted Coretta Scott for the first time in her life into a largely white community, and a white community that had decidedly different attitudes toward racial equality from those she had experienced in the South.  Coretta came to gain at Antioch a certain optimism for the prospects for the human condition and a sense of greater possibility for the future of race relations back home.  Arguably, her college years offered a first glance at the possibilities of the Beloved Community, Dr. King’s notion that, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”

In 1948, 21 years old and in her junior year, she was asked by the house journal of the National Urban League to write about what it was like being a young African American woman from Alabama attending college in the North.

She opens her essay with the words, “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to go to college. My parents are Negroes, respectable but poor, who live in Heiberger, Alabama.  I found early in life that being respectable did not necessarily bring respect—not in my home town.”  Coretta saw a very direct relationship between a college education and the possibilities for a rewarding and meaningful life.   Those few African Americans in Heiberger who had college degrees (and who were invariably school teachers), “had greater freedom of movement; they went on trips; they knew more about the world.  Although I knew they were not paid high salaries, they knew many different kinds of people; they could talk with pleasure about a lot of different subjects; they enjoyed books and music.  They were aware of the need for improving the political status of the Negro in the South.” 

“My decision of where to go to college was pretty much taken out of my hands.  My older sister was attending Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, when it was time for me to go to college; and I was offered an inter-racial scholarship by the Race Relations Committee of that institution.  I came north with a great deal of doubt about the wisdom of doing so and with a great deal of fear that I wouldn’t be able to fit into the very different environment.  Now I can be wise after the fact.  It seems to me now that every Negro student in the South ought to try to get some of his education in the  North if at all possible…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.”

Her own sense of the inescapable network of human mutuality rings through in these words.  And it will inform the whole of her life’s journey.

 She goes on.

“I’m now in my third year at Antioch as a major in education and music.  I chose music as my field because I get more pleasure working with music than with anything else.  After I get my degree from Antioch, I would like to go to a music conservatory and specialize in voice.  However, I am also majoring in education.  Concert work is uncertain, and whether or not I can secure recognition as a concert artist, I shall be able to support myself and get satisfaction from my job [as a teacher].  I’ve had to take courses in a number of fields beside music and education at Antioch—economics, chemistry, political science, philosophy, writing, literature, history—and I’m glad of this.  I’ve already learned that there are a lot of people who know music but nothing else.  I’ve learned that there are a lot of so-call educated people who never seem to have learned the facts of life about economics or sociology, at least judging by their actions toward the minority groups.”

Coretta Scott King’s appreciation of the importance of her college education seemed only to deepen with the passage of time.  In the 1993 edition of her autobiography, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., Mrs. King wrote:

“Sometimes I am asked what I think Antioch did for me. It did a great deal beyond the fine education I received. For one thing, it taught me how to get on in the white community.  Even its hypocrisies taught me not to expect too much, and to make allowance for, without condoning, the inbred things that people have difficulty with.  The Antioch experience helped me to reaffirm and deepen the values I had already acquired during childhood and adolescence, in my parents’ home and at Lincoln High School.”

“Antioch gave me an increased understanding of my own personal worth.  I was no longer haunted by a feeling of inadequacy just because I was an African American.  Antioch—the total experience of Antioch—was an important element in preparing me for the role I was to play as the wife of Martin Luther King, Jr., and for my part in the movement he led.”

Mrs. King maintained her ties to Antioch over the years.  She and Dr. King visited the campus in December 1967, she was the College’s commencement speaker in 1982, and in June 2004, Mrs. King was the guest of honor at the celebration of the College’s 150th anniversary.

In 2005, Mrs. King honored the College by agreeing to give her name to a new institute:  The Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom, dedicated to the advancement of values she held so dear—freedom, fairness and equality, non-violent social change.

Antioch’s founding president was Horace Mann, the great abolitionist and education reformer.  In his last commencement address to the College, in 1859, he said, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”  This remains the College’s motto to this day.

Winning victories for Humanity.

Mrs. King has won countless victories for humanity, a humanity defined by unqualified love, a humanity characterized by a network of mutuality, worthy of a destiny that can and must be achieved through nonviolence.   She leaves us with a tremendous legacy of leadership and courage and has forged a clear path for us to follow.