Children's Picture Book Database at Miami University

Coretta Scott was born in Alabama but left in her college years to attend Antioch College in Yellow Spring, Ohio after a stint at Lincoln Normal School. She wanted to teach in Yellow Springs but she was not given the right to do so since there were no black teachers in the schools. Later after marrying Martin Luther King, Coretta raised money for the civil rights movement by giving concerts and speaking about peace while their four children grew up in their close-knit family. Over the years as Martin came and went to lead protest marches of nonviolence, the political changes evolved - until one day, when Martin was shot and killed. Coretta continued the mutual work that she and Martin were doing - and Coretta broadened the message of nonviolence to include human rights across the world. Coretta and her staff trained 300,000 people in South Africa for the transition of Nelson Mandela out of prison. Coretta worked tirelessly to make Martin Luther King, Jr. Day a national holiday built on love with "a promise and power all its own".

Seamstress Rosa Parks displays her quiet strength by turning her NO into a YES for change by not getting up from the neutral section of the city bus where she sat. She recited in her mind that separate sections on the bus are "unequal" for Blacks who were supposed to ride the bus in the back. Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State, told 25 women to meet on campus after dinner to pray then print posters to boycott the buses the next day in support of Mrs. Parks. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. became the public spokesperson for the mass meeting of the Women's Political Council, the NAACP, and churches. Black people kept walking and not riding the city buses until on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that segregation was WRONG. One year after Mrs. Rose Parks had been arrested, blacks were no longer second-class citizens and were made equal under the law.