Book #33 of 2017:

My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King as told to The Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds

An eye-opening, heartbreaking, and inspiring memoir from Martin Luther King’s widow Coretta Scott King, herself a leading figure in the civil rights movement. Indeed, this book helps shine a light on Coretta’s own accomplishments, which have too often been overshadowed by those of her more famous husband. But the Kings were a team before his assassination, and her work for social justice continued until her own death nearly four decades later.

In the first half of this memoir, Coretta contextualizes and humanizes her late husband – who often tried to minimize her role in the civil rights movement and said that her place should be at home raising their children – while also sharing an intimate look at the private struggles they both went through in bringing their vision for racial justice to life. In the remaining pages, she discusses her own actions in the years following his death, in which she continued her husband’s work while also extending that vision of justice to new anti-war, anti-poverty, and anti-apartheid campaigns. It’s a harrowing account from a woman who faced regular death threats both before and after her husband’s assassination, and whose home was once firebombed while she was inside with her infant daughter, but also a powerful argument for the importance of speaking up against injustice anywhere and the ultimate effectiveness of nonviolent protest.

★★★☆☆

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