Mother
Juggling Motherhood & Fighting For Freedom:
“People asked me how was I able to do this and raise four children at the same time. I can only reply that when God calls you to a great task, he provides you with the strength to accomplish what he has called you to do. Faith and prayer, family and friends were always available when I needed them, and of course Martin and I always were there for each other.”
~ Coretta Scott King ~
Their nearly 15-year marriage existed against the backdrop of the most active—and, at times, most brutal—years of the Civil Rights Movement. Their first child, Yolanda, was born just two and a half weeks before the Montgomery Bus Boycott began on December 5, 1955. She was still an infant on the night of January 30, when a bomb was thrown and detonated in front of their home in Montgomery. Martin Luther King III was born five weeks after the Little Rock Central High School integration, and six weeks after President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The University of Georgia integrated the same month Dexter Scott King, their third child, was born in 1961. The Freedom Rides kicked off in May of that year. The youngest of their four children, Bernice, was 15 days old when her father was jailed in Birmingham, sparking the now-famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." Bernice was just shy of six months old when a bomb went off in the stairwell of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church there, killing four girls attending Sunday School.
