My Life, My Love, My LegacyMy Life, My Love, My Legacy

Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and singular twentieth-century American civil rights activist, as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to one of her closest friends. One of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, a committed pacifist, and a civil rights activist, Corretta was an avowed feminist--a graduate student determined to pursue her own career--when she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs and racial justice goals, she married King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, a marcher, a negotiator, and a crucial fundraiser in support of world-changing achievements. As a widow and single mother of four, she worked tirelessly to found and develop the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, championed gay rights and AIDS awareness, lobbied for fifteen years to help pass a bill establishing the US national holiday in honor of her slain husband, and was a powerful international presence, serving as a UN ambassador and playing a key role in Nelson Mandela's election. Coretta's is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an independent-minded black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful in the face of terrorism and violent hatred every single day of her life