by Trudy Goldberg

As advocates of Jobs for All we are deeply indebted to Coretta Scott King for her spirited and sustained leadership in the quest for full employment. In 1974, Scott King and Murray Finley, head of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, founded the National Committee for Full Employment/Full Employment Action Council (NCFE/FEAC) which brought together leaders in liberal, labor, religious, civil rights, black, ethnic, women’s, and senior citizens’ organizations with a stake in full employment. When a bill addressing the necessity for full employment was making its way through Congress, NCFE’s mission became the support of this legislation. In 1977, NCFE organized a Full Employment Action Week that mobilized more than 1.5 million people in protests and actions in 300 cities in support of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act—short of the massive civil rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the preceding decade but the largest mobilization in favor of full employment in U.S. history.

Thanks especially to the work of historian David P. Stein we know more about Scott King’s singular intellectual as well as organizational contributions to racial and economic justice. Before she met Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott was politically progressive, selected as a student delegate to the Progressive Party’s 1948 Convention and drawn to such leading black progressives as Shirely Graham and Paul Robeson. An active member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and Women’s Strike for Peace, Scott King spoke out against the Vietnam War and participated in anti-war events before her husband publicly declared his opposition to the disastrous American incursion in Southeast Asia. As she declared, “I am not a ceremonial symbol—I am an activist. I didn’t just emerge after Martin died—I was always there and involved.”

As Professor Stein writes, “Scott King saw economic precarity as not just a side effect of racial subjugation but as central to its functioning.” Further, Stein emphasizes the radical aspects of Scott King’s vision of social justice: “her commitment to ending all forms of violence—chief among them, the economic violence of wagelessness.”

Scott King emphasized the heavy dependence of the US economy on military spending–that the post World War II economy was not a peacetime economy. As Stein writes, “Scott King confronted this paradigm when NCFE/FEAC tried to shift such spending towards nonviolent priorities such as day care, housing for all, mass transportation, environmental conservation, and funding for arts and cultural activities.”

Four days after her husband was assassinated in Memphis—where he was supporting striking sanitation workers in their battle for higher wages, safer working conditions, and union recognition—Coretta Scott King traveled to Memphis. With three of her four children, she led a march in memory of Dr. King and in continuing support of the struggle for the sanitation workers. She announced that this march would initiate the Poor People’s Campaign to share America’s wealth that Rev. King had been planning just prior to his death. Moreover, she emphasized the “woman power” of the nation in healing a community damaged by war and racism.  The civil rights movement had achieved desegregation of public accommodations and, through voting rights, had acquired political power. Now, she declared, “we are at the point where we must have economic power.” Echoing her husband’s recent pronouncement — “We must create full employment or we must create incomes” — Scott King held: “Every man deserves a right to a job or an income.” In the days that followed, Scott King would repeatedly support and march in favor of workers’ rights and union recognition. In time, she would found what she referred to as her “fifth child,” the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta.

Within days after Dr. King was assassinated, Representative John Conyers, Jr. of Michigan introduced a bill to establish Dr. King’s January 15 birthday as a federal holiday. Coretta King lobbied members of Congress in support of the King holiday and organized a coalition of 750 political, religious, labor, and civil rights groups in support of the first national holiday dedicated to an African American. It took 15 years to realize that dream. In a tribute to Coretta King at the conclusion of her posthumous autobiography, Rep. Conyers wrote that “she carried great moral authority. We always felt she spoke for right at the right time. Her presence in political circles helped us men move beyond gendered traditions.”

With great energy, leadership skills, and intellectual prowess, Scott King became a leading proponent for racial, economic, social, and gender justice—and of full employment. In pursuit of those shared goals and in celebration of Black History Month, the National Jobs for All Network pays tribute to Coretta Scott King.

Selected Readings

Coretta Scott King, As Told to the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, My Life, My Love, My Legacy, Henry Holt, 2017.

David P. Stein, “This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s,” Souls, 18:1, 80-105, June 1, 2016.

David P. Stein, “Why Coretta Scott King Fought for a Job Guarantee,” Boston 50 Review, March 17, 2017.

See also:

Sheila D. Collins, Helen Lachs, Ginsburg, and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, Jobs for All: A Plan for the Revitalization of America, Apex Press, 1994.

Helen Ginsburg, Full Employment and Public Policy: The United States and Sweden, Lexington Books, 1983, “The Struggle for the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act,” pp. 63-84.

Trudy Goldberg is Professor Emerita of Social Work and Social Policy at Adelphi University and Chair of NJFAN. She is the author of numerous popular and scholarly works on comparative welfare states, the feminization of poverty, and the struggle for full employment and economic justice.