c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Coretta Scott King’s death at age 78 robs us of a larger-than-life figure; a woman who continually fought against injustices in both her “beloved community” of America and throughout the world.

One needn’t be a psychiatrist to know that childhood memories frequently shape a person’s life. Because of the racial segregation in her native Alabama, young Coretta Scott was forced to walk five miles each way to attend the inferior “colored” elementary school while white students were bused to a superior nearby school. She saw her father’s store burned to the ground by racists. Discrimination and violence were her companions on the long treks to school and, as a result, they became her lifelong adversaries.

Those painful events were in her memory bank when she emerged on the national stage in the 1950s as the wife of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a charismatic Baptist minister who began a nonviolent campaign demanding that America make good on its lofty promises of equal opportunity and justice for all its citizens.

But she was never overshadowed by her eloquent husband during his all-too-brief 39 years of life. Following his 1968 assassination, Coretta Scott King quickly became the symbolic “first widow” of America … a constant haunting reminder of that terrible April day in Memphis and a faithful keeper of “the Dream.” In that poignant role she successfully pressed for the creation of a national holiday to commemorate her husband’s birthday and she was the driving force and first president of the King Center in Atlanta.

However, as the years and decades passed, Coretta Scott King inexorably transcended that role and became a compelling champion of human rights for all people. Four years ago she told a large Jewish audience in Florida: “Surely, God didn’t put the full radiant rainbow of humanity in this land by coincidence. I think we have all been tossed on these shores together to provide an irresistible demonstration of the beloved community for the rest of the world. … Let us not merely accept our differences, but celebrate our kinship as sisters and brothers of the human family. … Not mere tolerance. … A great democracy should have higher aspirations.”

She traveled to many countries denouncing racial, religious and ethnic bigotry. Mrs. King constantly spoke out in behalf of economic justice, gay and lesbian rights, AIDS victims, nuclear disarmament, the poor and the environment. No longer the “first widow,” she became something more enduring: the “first lady” of human rights.

Not surprisingly, the Jewish community was especially close to her. She often recalled that in the 1960s Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel had joined her husband in a protest march in Selma, Ala., and she called the rabbi “one of the great men of our time.”

In a personal message to the Israeli Knesset, Mrs. King declared, “perhaps nowhere in the world is there a greater appreciation of the desirability and necessity of peace than in Israel.”

Sherry Frank, the American Jewish Committee’s Atlanta director, was a personal friend of Mrs. King.

“I remember telling her I was going to the former Soviet Union to meet with Soviet Jews, including the wives of refusniks whose husbands were in prison for their activism. She autographed three of her books and asked me to bring them to the prisoners’ families as a sign of solidarity with their struggle to be free.”

Mrs. King needed no reminder about what it meant to have a courageous husband in jail.

In 1991, when the Saddam Hussein regime was firing SCUD missiles into Israel, Mrs. King signed a newspaper ad calling for an end to the Iraqi attacks. She joined members of the Atlanta Black/Jewish Coalition in publicly denouncing the ugly anti-Jewish statements of Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, in which he referred to Judaism as “a gutter religion.”

Frank also remembers some “quiet personal things” about her friend: “Once Mrs. King called me just to ask for guidance about the right synagogue for a Jewish member of her staff to join. She was concerned about the person’s spiritual life. … I remember marching with her in Selma, Ala., Forsyth County, Ga., and Washington, D.C. She was tireless in her dedication to the cause of equality for all.”

MO/JL END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

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