Coretta Scott King and Looking Backwards
No MLK without CSK
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In 1952, Coretta Scott, the woman who was to be Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife, recommended that he read Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Bellamy’s depiction of a future socialist utopia had a powerful effect on King and helped shape his thinking on economic issues and his later condemnation of capitalist exploitation. Bellamy’s impact underlines Scott’s importance as an influence on King’s thought and as an activist in her own right.
Coretta Scott, Activist
Coretta Scott was born in 1927 in Marion, Alabama. White supremacists burned down her home and her father’s sawmill in the early 1940s, inspiring her lifelong opposition to racism and violence. At Antioch College, she was deeply involved in antiracist and antiwar activism; she was a member of the NAACP and of the Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees.
Scott earned a scholarship for her singing to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. There she met Martin Luther King, Jr., who was pursuing a doctorate at Boston University. A mutual friend tried to set them up. Coretta was wary at first, she said: “I had an aversion to ministers because of a stereotyped impression of them.” Martin was persistent though and got her number from a friend and convinced her to go to lunch. She recounted that by the end of their lunch, King was already talking about marriage.
According to historian Clayborne Carson, Scott was “was more politically active” when they met than King was. The two talked regularly about politics, racism, inequality, and Christianity. As part of that conversation, Scott sent King a copy of Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward. She included a note which read, “I shall be interested to know your reactions to Bellamy’s predictions about our future.”
Looking Backward
On its release, Looking Backward sold more than a million copies, surpassed in the 19th century only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Its vision of a collective utopian future in the (then distant) year of 2000 had a powerful effect on thinkers of the day. It inspired political clubs and utopian communities, and the AFL and other unions praised it.
The book imagines a United States in which major goods and industries have been collectivized and are owned by the state. The government employs everyone, assigning work through central planning. Working hours are drastically reduced, and there is no child labor. People begin working at 24 and can retire at 45. Food is available for all in public kitchens. “Four fifths of the labor of men was utterly wasted by the mutual warfare, the lack of organization and concert among the workers,” Bellamy argues. Socialism and solidarity, he believes, can create abundance, equality, and justice for all.
Martin Luther King on Looking Backward
In a July 18, 1952 letter to Scott, King responded enthusiastically to Bellamy’s novel. He writes to Scott that the book is “both stimulating and fascinating” and says that “Bellamy had the insight of a social prophet as well as the fact finding mind of the social scientist.”
King continues:
I welcomed the book because much of its content is in line with my basic ideas. I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. So I think Bellamy is right in seeing the gradual decline of capitalism. [italics added]
King also praises Bellamy for arguing for gradual, peaceful social change, and for rejecting what King sees as Communist support for violent revolution. And King agrees with Bellamy and with Marx that religion can “become a tool of the middle class to keep the proletariat oppressed.” Christians, he says, need to focus on fixing evils here, now, on earth, rather than simply promising a reward in heaven.
King, however, rejects Marx’s atheism, and he argues Bellamy is too optimistic. “I don’t think he gave capitalism long enough time to die,” he writes, and adds, “Remember it took feudalism more than 500 years to pass out from its death bed. Capitalism will be in America quite a few more years, my dear.” Yet, he concludes, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry.”
The Kings and Socialism
Coretta and Martin married on June 18, 1953, about eleven months after their discussion of Bellamy. They both soon, and famously, became intensely involved in the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for racial equality.
They also both remained committed to the kind of socialist and economic transformation discussed in Looking Backward. At a staff retreat of the SCLC in 1966, King suggested America needed to adopt “democratic socialism” and he argued that “there must be a better distribution of wealth” in the US.
In his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, King restated the criticisms of capitalism he’d written in his letter to Coretta Scott 15 years earlier. “Capitalism has often left a gap of superfluous wealth and abject poverty [and] has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.” In a 1968 interview with the New York Times, he said, “we are engaged in the class struggle.”
Coretta Scott King continued to urge her husband to adopt a radical agenda. She was a committed international peace activist, helping to found the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in 1957 and serving as a delegate for the Women’s Strike for Peace to the 1962 Disarmament Conference in Geneva. She spoke in public and private against US involvement in the Vietnam War and addressed antiwar rallies in New York City and DC in 1965, two years before her husband publicly came out against the war.
After King’s assassination in 1968, Coretta Scott King continued civil rights work, advocating for peace, full employment, and income redistribution. She spoke passionately and consistently for LGBT rights, reminding some skeptical critics, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” She might also have been thinking of Edward Bellamy’s words: “With fervency I spoke of that new world, blessed with plenty, purified by justice and sweetened by brotherly kindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamed, but which might so easily be made real.”
Sources Consulted
Tenisha Armstrong, “She Persisted: Honoring Coretta Scott King (1927–2006),” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute: Stanford University, accessed October 11, 2024. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/she-persisted-honoring-coretta-scott-king-1927-2006
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/624/pg624-images.html
Clayborn Carson as told to Cori Brosnahan, “Dr. King’s Bookshelf,” Roads to Memphis: PBS.org, April 2018. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/memphis-dr-kings-bookshelf/
Matthew Miles Goodrich, “The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King Jr.,” In These Times, January 15, 2018. https://inthesetimes.com/article/martin-luther-king-jr-day-socialism-capitalism
Martin Luther King, Jr. “To Coretta Scott: July 18, 1952,” The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute: Stanford, accessed October 11, 2024. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/coretta-scott
“Looking Backward,” Wikipedia, accessed October 11, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward ‘
Jeanne Theoharis, “Accidental Matriarchs and Beautiful Helpmates: Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, and the Memorialization of the Civil Rights Movement,” in Emilye Crosby, Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, A National Movement, University of Georgia Press, 2011, pp. 385-418.
Jeanne Theoharis, “‘I am not a symbol, I am an activist’: the untold story of Coretta Scott King,” Guardian, February 3, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/03/coretta-scott-king-extract
Loved this! CSK has become a personal hero since I read more about the depth of her contributions in Solidarity by Astra Taylor & Leah Hunt-Hendrix. I was thrilled to learn even more from your newsletter.
I never knew about Bellamy! I gotta check out his book now👍🏻 Thank you for the introduction.