OxfordPress.com

Antioch College's ideals lasted King a lifetime

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio — Before she married the man who would change the world, before she became a mother of four and the matriarch of the civil rights movement, Coretta Scott King was simply a girl from rural Alabama who wanted to go to college.

She was still in high school in Marion, Ala., when her older sister, Edythe, headed to Antioch College in the fall of 1943. Edythe, who had first visited Antioch as a member of her high school chorus, was the first recipient of a new scholarship aimed at integrating the all-white school in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Two years later, it was Coretta's turn, beginning a lifelong relationship with the school that helped shape her into the woman she would become. The strength of that relationship was demonstrated last week when her family requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be given to a scholarship fund at Antioch in her honor.

"I came North," King wrote in "The Journal of Negro Life" as a college junior in 1948, "with a good deal of doubt about the wisdom of doing so and with a good deal of fear that I wouldn't be able to fit into the very different environment."

After she arrived, King found herself immersed in Antioch's progressive culture. As a freshman, she remembered being shown a large stone monument in the center of campus — a tribute to Antioch's first president, Horace Mann. She read the famous words that became the college's motto: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

Mann's words, King said later in a speech at her alma mater, became "a challenge I took very seriously, and which became a paramount goal in my life."

The King family's announcement last week encouraging donations for Antioch thrilled people in this small college community, many of whom say King's accomplishments in the civil rights arena are the embodiment of the ideals they are trying to impart to students.

"This is a place where students prepare their lives for a meaning and purpose," said Antioch President Steven Lawry. "It's a life of civic engagement."

Since its founding in 1852 as a private liberal arts college, Antioch has always veered radically from a traditional college plan. Conformity is shunned. Activism is encouraged. Every other semester, students are pushed out of the classrooms and into communities in cooperative education programs aimed at giving them real-life experiences. The school, which now has an enrollment of about 560, of whom about 13 percent are minorities, thinks of itself as an academic laboratory, a springboard for students to the greater purpose of correcting social injustices. It's a lofty goal, Lawry admits, but one to which the college is deeply committed.

As an undergraduate on the socially charged campus, King quickly became politicized. She became active in the Ohio Progressive Party and attended her first national political convention in 1948. She joined the NAACP and campus race relations and civil liberties committees.

"She was the type of person you just felt was going to succeed in whatever she did," said Antioch classmate Paul Graham, one of the few other black students on campus at the time. "She was quite lively and outgoing."

Still, King and other minority students faced prejudice. When King, who majored in education and music, applied for a teaching assignment in Greene County public schools, the school board refused to allow her in the classroom to teach.

King instead was forced to get her teaching experience in an on-campus nursery school. It was an experience King would later say gave her a growing sense that she would become involved more heavily in social reform.

Phyllis Jackson, a friend of the Scott sisters during their time in Ohio, said African-Americans in the local community — her own family included — tried to make the girls feel welcome.

"It was not the most comfortable time for them," said Jackson, who often invited the Scotts to dances in town. "But there was a great sense of pride that they were here."

Jackson said the school board that excluded King from teaching was soon voted out of office and the policy was changed to allow black teachers to teach in integrated schools.

Even after she left Antioch for Boston to pursue a musical career at the New England Conservatory, King continued to keep in touch with her mentors at the Ohio school. In 1965, she accompanied her husband to her alma mater as he addressed commencement. The rousing speech made headlines and marked one of the first times the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War.

Irwin Abrams, an Antioch professor at the time, said he remembered well the conversation he had with King as he drove with the couple from the airport. King had received a death threat, Abrams said, and they talked about the possibility that he might be killed.

"[King] said he felt that this was going to happen to him and that he was ready for it," Abrams, now 90, said. "I always remembered that."

In 2004, the last time Coretta Scott King visited Antioch, Abrams said, she told him: "Keep on doing what you're doing."

"I told her," he said, "to keep on doing what the world expects of you."

King was a "woman who wore her honors lightly," Abrams said. "Her interest in Antioch always remained strong."

Like Antioch, the town of Yellow Springs has long been known for its progressive ideas. It's a place where you're more likely to see Birkenstocks than business suits on the streets downtown.

Pro-choice and anti-war bumper stickers dot cars along the streets. Yoga studios, organic food markets and eclectic coffee shops make up some of the town's main businesses.

Antioch students today, like those in King's time, abide by the motto that they should challenge authority. They have a say in which professors get tenure and which speakers come to campus, and student representatives serve on every committee in the college.

The college attracts bright, socially conscious students who might stick out on traditional campuses. Mohawks and nose piercings are not uncommon, nor are combat boots or wacky colored hair dye. Since its founding, Antioch has been home to seven MacArthur Fellows — often called the "genius grant" — the fifth-largest number of all colleges and universities in the country.

In the mid-1990s, students drafted a 17-page sexual conduct policy that every student and visitor to campus must read. It lays out, in painstaking detail, a list of rules students and visitors must follow in order to avoid offending one another.

Louise Smith, assistant dean of faculty of Antioch and a graduate herself, said Antioch has always "been on the cutting edge of radical politics."

"Our students are doing more than just learning a discipline," she said. "They are always thinking, 'What's my place in the world? How can I contribute?' They're always pushing the envelope."

Antioch students do everything from studying bugs in Brazil to teaching English in Africa. They intern at museums, nonprofit organizations and worker rights groups. More than 80 percent travel abroad, although 60 percent of all students are eligible for Pell grants — meaning their parents have below-average incomes. Ninety percent of Antioch's students receive some kind of financial aid to offset the $25,000 a year tuition cost.

Eve Williams, a 20-year-old third-year student, attended a Quaker boarding school in New Hampshire before arriving at Antioch.

Williams, who received a Coretta Scott King scholarship for being an outstanding female African-American scholar, plans to attend King's funeral in Atlanta today. She met the civil rights icon when King came to campus in 2004 to receive the Horace Mann Award, the college's highest honor, and said she hopes to one day follow in her footsteps.

Williams wants to work with middle school-aged children, catching them, she said, at the crucial time when they need motivation and guidance.

"I want to spend my life trying to instill hope in the next generation," Williams said. "I want to tell those who think they can't come up from poverty, from racial lines, that while it's a struggle they can."

Andrea Jones writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: ajones AT ajc.com