Coretta Scott King was born April 27, 1927, in Heiberger, near Marion, Alabama. She spent her childhood on her parents' farm in Heiberger. The farm had been in the family since the Civil War, but the Scotts were not at all rich. They were so hard hit during the Depression that the children picked cotton to help earn money. There were three children Edythe, Coretta, and Obie. Obie was named after his father, Obediah Scott, a resourceful man who was the first black person in the district to own a truck and who eventually opened a country store. Their mother, Bernice (McMurray) Scott, was also a strong character.

King inherited a love of music from her mother, and at Lincoln High School she learned to play the trumpet and piano, and sang as a soloist at school recitals. An intelligent and hardworking student, she did well in her schoolwork too and was at the top of her class when she graduated in 1945. She then enrolled at Antioch College, Ohio, where her sister Edythe had been the first fulltime black student to live on campus.

At Antioch College, King majored in music and education. She also took part in the college's work-study program.  By the time she graduated in 1951, she had decided to become a professional singer rather than a schoolteacher and had been accepted by the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Although King had a scholarship to cover her tuition at the conservatory, it did not pay for anything else, and she barely scraped by during her first year in Boston. To pay for her bed and breakfast, she cleaned the stairwells of the house she lived in, and for supper she usually made do with peanut butter and crackers. The following year was easier, because she received state aid from Alabama, but she still had to watch every penny.

While studying at the conservatory she met Martin Luther King Jr., who was also a student in Boston at the time, and they were married in 1953. The following year, after Coretta Scott King had graduated from the conservatory, they moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr. began his work as a minister.

In marrying a man committed to civil rights, King knew that she would not live the life of a quiet minister's wife.  The next few years saw Coretta King sharing as full partner in her husband's work.  She also made her own personal contribution. On behalf of the Women's Strike for Peace, she was a delegate at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1962, and she often gave concerts on behalf of the civil rights movement, for she was still keeping up with her music.

When her husband was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, Coretta King took it for granted that she would continue his work. Just four days after his death she led a march of fifty thousand people through the streets of Memphis, and later that year she took his place in the Poor People's March to Washington.

King's main concern in 1969 was the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which she planned to create in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the years, King has worked hard to raise funds for the center, which now covers three full blocks and houses a library and archives of the civil rights movement. King oversaw the center, which succeeded in achieving her other major goal to get her husband's birthday honored as a national holiday. She has a third goal too, and this is a continuing one, for she continues to speak out against injustice, especially racial injustice, doing what she can to make her husband's dream of fairness and equality come true.

On January 31, 2006, Coretta Scott King died in her sleep at Santa Monica Hospital, a holistic health center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. She was 78.

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