SHARES HIS FIGHT FOR EQUALITY

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30633, 26 December 1964, Page 2

SHARES HIS FIGHT FOR EQUALITY

(By SUSAN VAUGHAN)

“I knew," said Mrs Coretta King last week, “that when I met my husband 12 yearg ago, this was the man with whom I would share my life. But I never imagined it would turn out like this.” “This” is a continuous struggle for racial equality, for which her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, leader of 22 million American Negroes, has been jailed 14 times; has been beaten up, humiliated, and has had Ku Klux Klan crosses stuck on his lawn. “This” has been retaliation with the tactic of non-vio-lence: Luther King has fought his oppressors with the methods perfected by Gandhi. And “this” led Luther King and his wife last week to Oslo, where he received the Nobel Prize for peace. Coretta, who is 37, and Luther King, who is 36 and the grandson of a slave, met in Boston where both were studying. Same Interests “We both had the same interests,” Coretta recalls. “We were both very bound up in the Negro problem and spent hours talking together. After we were married I would spend all my time trailing round after him from meeting to meeting. I would never have seen him if I stayed at home, though sometimes I longed to relax.” One problem they have had to face up to away from the roar of the public platform, is how to bring up their children in a colour-bar

world. They have four children: the eldest nine years old, the youngest 20 months.

Coretta has had to explain to her children that “unpleasant” things may happen to i them because of their colour.

“When my children ask,” she says, “I explain the situation to them in realistic terms. There are good and bad people in this world, I tell them. My children will not grow up hating.” (All Rights Reserved)