Turtle Learning: singer

"Coretta Scott was born on 27 April 1927, near Marion, Alabama. Her parents, Obadiah ‘‘Obie’’ Scott and Bernice McMurray Scott, were farm owners committed to ensuring that their children received the best education possible. Scott attended the private Lincoln High School in Marion, where she developed her interest in music. There she took formal vocal lessons, learned to read music, and played several instruments. By the age of 15, she had become the choir director and pianist of her church’s junior choir.

"After graduating from Lincoln, Scott won a partial scholarship to Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the same university her sister Edythe had attended as the ﬁrst African American student. While at Antioch, Scott studied voice and music education. She also became a member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as the Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees. In an article, ‘‘Why I Came to College,’’ published in Opportunity in 1948, Scott wrote that college graduates, ‘‘had greater freedom of movement: they went on trips; they visited cities; they knew more about the world’’ (Scott, 42). She later credited Antioch with preparing her for her role in the civil rights movement, stating that ‘‘the college’s emphasis on service to mankind reinforced the Christian spirit of giving and sharing’’ and provided ‘‘a new self-assurance that encouraged me in competition with all people’’ (Scott King, 43).

"In 1951, Scott enrolled in Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music with a grant from the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation. In early 1952, her friend Mary Powell introduced her to King, then a doctoral candidate at Boston University’s School of Theology. While initially wary of dating a Baptist minister, she was impressed by his sophistication and intellect and recalled King telling her: ‘‘You have everything I have ever wanted in a wife’’ (Scott King, 53). The two were married at the Scott family home near Marion on 18 June 1953. After the wedding, they returned to Boston to complete their degrees. Coretta Scott King earned her bachelor of music degree in June 1954.

"Although Scott King was focused on raising the couple’s four children: Yolanda Denise King (1955), Martin Luther King, III (1957), Dexter Scott King (1961), and Bernice Albertine King (1963), she continued to play a critical role in many of the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, performing in freedom concerts that included poetry recitation, singing, and lectures related to the history of the civil rights movement. The proceeds from these concerts were donated to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

"Scott King also accompanied her husband around the world, traveling to Ghana in 1957 and India in 1959. She was particularly affected by the women she met in India. ‘‘As we traveled through the land, we were greatly impressed by the part women played in the political life of India, far more than in our own country’’ (Scott King, 162). In 1962, Coretta Scott King’s 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 for the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. She later recalled thinking: ‘‘What a blessing, to be a co-worker with a man whose life would have so profound an impact on the world’’ (Scott King, 12).

"After King’s assassination on 4 April 1968, Coretta Scott King devoted much of her life to spreading her husband’s philosophy of nonviolence. Just days after his death, she led a march on behalf of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Later that month, she 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 thereafter participated in numerous anti-poverty efforts."

"With a deep commitment to preserving King’s legacy, almost immediately Coretta Scott King began mobilizing support for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. As founding president of the King Center, she guided its construction next to Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King had served as co-pastor with his father, Martin Luther King, Sr.

"Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Scott King continued to speak publicly and write nationally syndicated columns, and began efforts to establish a national holiday in honor of her husband. In 1983, she led an effort that brought more than a half-million demonstrators to Washington, D.C., to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King had delivered his famous ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech. 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 January 1986."

"During the 1980’s, Coretta Scott King 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. In 1986, she traveled to South Africa and met with Winnie Mandela. She also remained active in various women’s organizations, including the National Organization for Women, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and United Church Women."

"Throughout her life, Coretta Scott King carried the message of nonviolence and social justice to almost every corner of the globe. On 30 January 2006, Coretta Scott King died in her sleep at a holistic health center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. She was 78 years old. "

Martin Luther King Jr. ... - http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_king_coretta_scott_1927_2006/
About Mrs. King - http://www.thekingcenter.org/about-mrs-king
www.history.com -- http://www.history.com/topics/coretta-scott-king
biography.com -- http://www.biography.com/people/coretta-scott-king-9542067#synopsis
The King Center - http://www.thekingcenter.org/about-mrs-king

SOURCES At King Encyclopedia Stanford University - see link above

Introduction in Papers 2:12–14, 19.

King, Stride Toward Freedom, 1958.

(Scott) King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., 1969.

Scott, ‘‘Why I Came to College,’’ Opportunity 26 (1948): 42, 70.

Eartha Kitt's name always conjures up a memory of her singing "Santa Baby" and also her beautiful face. I thought she was a very accomplished singer, dancer, movie star, and more. Most people remember her as the infamous CATWOMAN in the Batman TV series. I don't think I owned a TV at that time.
Here is her "official" website which gives quite a good deal of information about her. And this image:

The Guardian wrote a sympathetic column about Eartha Kitt, especially the fact that she never learned who her white father was. She wasn't permitted to see his name as it was blacked out of her birth certificate by the white racist South Carolinian authorities. She was very bitter about this. Imagine being born in 1927 in the deep south and being shunned by both whites and Blacks. Her own mother gave her up to relatives who abused her.
Her daughter Kitt Shapiro had this to say about Eartha: "She never found out her father's name, but always assumed he was white. My mother was referred to as a 'yellow gal', which was not a compliment. It meant someone who thought they were better than everyone else even though my mother was just a child at the time. She was horribly abused in the South. She was beaten, mistreated, emotionally and physically."
"Kitt became a leading light in the civil rights movement in the 1960s but when she condemned the Vietnam war on a visit to the White House her career in the US ended and the CIA branded her "a sadistic nymphomaniac". By then Kitt had divorced the father of her daughter, Bill McDonald, who was a white businessman and wounded Korean war veteran addicted to painkillers, and mother and daughter moved to London to relaunch her career in Europe. Shapiro said: "We lived in Knightsbridge and later Fulham. I went to school in London and spent many a year in England. My mother regarded England as a second home."
From the N.Y. Times obituary: "As bookings dried up, she was exiled in Europe for almost a decade. But President Jimmy Carter invited her back to the White House in 1978, and that year she earned her first Tony nomination for her work in “Timbuktu!,” an all-black remake of “Kismet.”
Astonishing that people in this country know so little about Eartha Kitt other than her singing and Catwoman status.

Eartha Kitt's daughter has set up the Eartha Kitt Foundation to benefit the area where her mother was born. Apparently it is still suffering from the effects of the October 2015 floods and 40,000 people still don't have access to potable water. "The state’s infrastructure and agricultural industry are in disarray: more than 60 dams have been destroyed, and countless acres of farmland have been deemed barren and unusable. As is often the case, small businesses have been hit especially hard by this statewide downturn, shutting their doors at an alarming rate. The fiscal total of this damage is valued at roughly $1.2 billion. In the wake of this natural disaster, South Carolina’s economy has been devastated."

I hope that people will learn what a complex and accomplished person Eartha Kitt was but also a strong fighter for the rights of people, a supporter of the civil rights movement, and a person who risked her entire life opposing the war in Vietnam at a luncheon with Lady Byrd Johnson. I would love to be as courageous as she was.

Here is a photo of Eartha and daughter Kitt to whom she gave unconditional love.

Turtle Learning

Friday, March 4, 2016

MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH - CORETTA SCOTT KING

Saturday, February 6, 2016

FEBRUARY IS AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH - EARTHA KITT

Unsung Heroes

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