Celebrating the contributions of notable women in history
As part of Women’s History Month, this series will celebrate and recognize some of the great achievements of women throughout our history.
Coretta Scott King was the widow of one of history’s most influential leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., but she was an activist and community leader in her own right. She made numerous contributions to the struggle for social justice and human rights. Born in 1927 in Alabama, early on, she developed an interest in music and played several instruments. After graduating from high school, she earned a scholarship to Antioch College in Ohio. While at Antioch, she studied voice and music education and became a member of the local chapter of the NAACP, as well as the Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees.
She enrolled in Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music in 1951. In early 1952, she was introduced to King, then a doctoral candidate at Boston University’s School of Theology. The two were married at the Scott family home near Marion in 1953. After the wedding, they returned to Boston to complete their degrees. She continued to play a critical part in many of the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, performing in freedom concerts that included poetry, singing, and lectures. The proceeds from these concerts were donated to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
She also accompanied her husband around the world. In 1962, her interest in disarmament efforts took her to Geneva, Switzerland, where she served as a Women’s Strike for Peace delegate to the 17-nation Disarmament Conference. Two years later, she accompanied her husband to Oslo as he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. After Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, she devoted much of her life to spreading his philosophy of nonviolence. Shortly after his death, she led a march on behalf of sanitation workers in Memphis. She later stood in for her husband at an anti–Vietnam War rally in New York. In May 1968, she helped to launch the Poor People’s Campaign and participated in many anti-poverty efforts.
She later began mobilizing support for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. As the King Center’s founding president, she guided its construction next to Ebenezer Baptist Church. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she continued to speak publicly and write nationally syndicated columns. As chairperson of the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission, she successfully formalized plans for the annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which began in 1986.
During the 1980s, she reaffirmed her long-standing opposition to South African apartheid, participating in a series of sit-in protests in Washington that prompted nationwide demonstrations against South African racial policies. Throughout her life, she carried the message of nonviolence and social justice and her legacy continues to endure after her death in 2006 at age 78.
Juanita Abernathy was a community organizer who marched and campaigned for voting rights for African Americans and to integrate schools during the 1950s and 1960s. She helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott and took part in several pivotal protests alongside her husband, the Rev. Dr. Ralph Abernathy, a leader of the civil rights movement.
Abernathy was there as the movement took shape in the 1950s in Montgomery, where her husband and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized the Montgomery bus boycott.
It lasted 13 months, with the Abernathys’ kitchen table serving as the setting for many strategy sessions. She was a key part of organizing a plan to ensure that people could get to work without taking a bus. She arranged carpools and helped get people around town. The boycott was instrumental in leading to the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw segregation by race in Montgomery’s public transit system and by extension, the rest of the country.
She was born on Dec. 1, 1931, in Uniontown, Alabama, the youngest of eight children. She was educated at Selma University Prep School, a boarding school for Black students and she met Dr. Abernathy when she was in ninth grade and he was in the Army. They married in 1952, after she received her bachelor’s degree from Tennessee State University in Nashville. The family moved to Atlanta in 1961, where she helped with efforts to integrate the first public schools in Atlanta. She also fought for the creation of a National Food Stamp Program for low-income families and a National Free Meal Program for public school children.
After Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, she sought a less tumultuous life and joined the Mary Kay cosmetics company, where she rose to become a national sales director. She continued her civil rights and civic work, including traveling around the world on peace missions. She also served on the boards of MARTA and other civic organizations. In 2007, she campaigned for Barack Obama for president, and at his inauguration, she was seated in a place of honor. One of the last surviving architects of the modern civil rights movement, she died in 2019 at the age of 87.
Alethea Boone is a prominent civil rights activist who played a significant role in the fight for racial justice in Atlanta. She was married to the Rev. Joseph E. Boone, a key civil rights figure who marched together with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This brought her into contact with many local and national leaders within the civil rights movement. She was a member of the inner circle of ministers’ wives who served as the backbone of Operation Breadbasket, the economic arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
A native of Selma, Alabama, she received her bachelor’s degree from Talladega College, the National Defense Educational Act Certificat de l’Etude in French studies from Emory University, and a master’s degree from Atlanta University in 1971.
Her service to Atlanta began as a foreign language teacher at Booker T. Washington High School. Later, in spite of the dangers of being involved in the civil rights movement, she volunteered her home to civil rights field workers, prepared meals for them, and organized a bus trip to Washington D.C. during the Poor People’s campaign, all while balancing a career as a teacher with family and church responsibilities.
She has been a Fulton County poll worker, deputy registrar, and advisory board member of the Department of Family and Children Services. She also holds memberships in the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., and Rush Congregational Church, where she has served as organist and past president of the Women’s Fellowship.
Her numerous civic and professional awards include recognition as Kennedy Middle School’s Teacher of the Year, Outstanding Foreign Language Teacher for Atlanta Public Schools, as well as a City of Atlanta Civil and Voting Rights Legend, the Atlanta Rust College Alumni Service and the Spirit of Avon Award.
She has worked tirelessly for the city’s youth and helped deeply enrich the lives of others through her work in education and the civil rights movement. Her legacy continues today, in part, through the work of her daughter, District 10 Council member Andrea L. Boone. Alethea Boone helped to bring attention to the struggle for civil rights and has inspired many others.
Viola Liuzzo was a white civil rights activist from Michigan and mother of five who was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members after the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama. She was an active member of the NAACP in Detroit and was horrified at the violence she saw inflicted upon Black protestors on television. Born in Pennsylvania in 1925, she was raised in poverty in Georgia and Tennessee during the Great Depression where she witnessed segregation first-hand. She later moved to Michigan, married her husband, Anthony, in 1950, and graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit.
In 1965, Liuzzo witnessed footage of hundreds of peaceful protestors being clubbed and tear-gassed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. This spurred her to join the efforts of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, in transporting marchers between Selma and Montgomery. She drove her Oldsmobile 800 miles to Selma, and on March 25, she was driving 19-year-old Leroy Moton, an African American, to Montgomery, when a car carrying four KKK members began chasing them. The car pulled alongside Liuzzo’s car, and they shot her, killing her instantly. Moton, though covered in Liuzzo’s blood, was not hit.
Within 24 hours of the murder, President Lyndon Johnson appeared on television to announce the arrests of the four men. Liuzzo’s funeral in Detroit was attended by many dignitaries, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Her death would not be in vain and was believed to be crucial in Congress delivering to President Johnson a civil rights bill and sparking the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Liuzzo’s life was honored posthumously with numerous awards, including the prestigious Ford Freedom Humanitarian Award. Wayne State also bestowed its first-ever posthumous honorary doctorate degree to Liuzzo in 2015 in a ceremony witnessed by four of her children, their children, her great-grandchildren, and other family and friends.
