By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Coretta Scott King, widow of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK), visited Utah 35 years ago this week. I was just 24 years old, about to finish law school, and thrilled for the chance to hear her speak.
An Alabama native, Mrs. King met her future husband when they both attended graduate school in Boston. She was studying music, he was working on his doctorate in theology. They married in 1953. Although busy raising their four children, Mrs. King also was a leader in the civil rights movement, a role that grew more important after her husband was killed in 1968.
NBC News once wrote, “Over the years, King was with her husband in his finest hours. She was at his side as he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. She marched beside him from Selma, Ala., into Montgomery in 1965 on the triumphant drive for a voting rights law.” Her work eventually brought her to Utah too.
In early February 1986, the Utah Legislature was debating whether to recognize a holiday to honor MLK, which the federal government and 47 other states already had done. Senator Terry Williams—Utah’s first African-American state senator—invited Mrs. King to come to Salt Lake City and address a joint session of the Legislature.
A recent article in the Utah Historical Quarterly (Winter 2020) tells the full story about the legislative debate. News archives indicate that Mrs. King calmly told the legislators, “It is important that we teach our young people, because they are the ones that are going to be hopefully picking up the torch and caring it forward in the future.”
When she finished, most of the lawmakers gave her a standing ovation. Unfortunately, they did not adopt a state holiday in the name of her husband. Instead, Utah created a “Human Rights Day.” Another 14 years passed before the Legislature changed the holiday’s name in 2000 to expressly honor MLK.
Later in the evening of her one day February 1986 Utah visit, Mrs. King also addressed an enthusiastic group of students at Brigham Young University in Provo. According to news reports, she told her young audience that although they may think her “crazy” for saying it, she thought they could “change the world” with nonviolence, because it converts “wrongs into rights” and “ennobles the person.”
I got to hear Mrs. King speak on that day before all these other public events. I never heard MLK in person, but I knew he often preached in churches. When I learned that Mrs. King’s first speech during her busy Utah visit also would be in a church, I knew I wanted to be part of the congregation.
At the time, I was working as a full-time extern at the Utah Supreme Court. During our lunch break, one of the judge’s law clerks and I drove a few blocks from the State Capitol to Salt Lake City’s First Baptist Church. There, we joined a spirited and full house at an event cosponsored by the nearby University of Utah.
Mrs. King used the less formal and more familiar church setting to give a more intimate address than she would present at the legislature or at BYU. She told us about her own work at the MLK Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. The center, she described, teaches youth the “methods of peace” before “they have been conditioned” to hate. She explained, “We teach faith, why can’t we teach them to love?”
For any skeptics in the house who doubted the power of love, Mrs. King reiterated a simple message: “We haven’t tried hard enough.” She noted how MLK once said, “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
Mrs. King also had a message for anyone who felt Utah was too far off the beaten path to make much of a difference on any of the topics she addressed. She reminded the congregation what her late husband wrote in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham City Jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Finally, addressing the primary purpose of her Utah visit—the MLK holiday—Mrs. King said it was not so important to recognize her husband specifically as to remember what he symbolized: “George Washington presided over the violent revolution in America. Martin Luther King, Jr. presided over the non-violent revolution.”
With that, Mrs. King was off to meet with Utah’s governor and legislators and to talk with them about such important symbolism. My Supreme Court colleague and I had to get back to work too. As we left First Baptist Church, my colleague verbalized exactly what I was thinking, “I am so glad that we got to hear Mrs. King speak in such a soulful setting.”
Some 35 years after that soulful Salt Lake City moment, and over five decades after Mrs. King’s husband was gunned down by an assassin’s bullets, our world remains violent. Mrs. King taught a very simple lesson from her 1986 Utah church pulpit, and it still resonates today: “If I’m the sole individual that stands for nonviolence, I will be that individual, because violence does not solve social problems.”
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
