A Celebration of Her Life
(1927 -
2006)
Coretta Scott King
Her Childhood in Heiberger
Coretta
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.
As
a young child, King walked five miles each day to attend the
one-room Crossroads School. When she was older, she studied at
Lincoln High School in Marion, nine miles away. Since this was
too far to walk, her mother hired a bus and drove all the
black students in the area to and from school — a most
unusual course of action for a black woman in the 1930s. The
alternative would have been for the children to stay in Marion
all week, returning home only at weekends, but Mrs. Scott did
not want her children to be away from home so much.
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.
(
View Funeral Program)
Curtsey of CNN
