Civil rights activist
Born: January 5, 1930;
Died: June 10, 2018
DOROTHY Cotton, who has died aged 88, was a civil rights activist who worked closely with the Rev Martin Luther King Jr and was the only woman in his inner circle. She played a critical role in teaching non-violence to demonstrators before marches and demonstrations and was also known for sometimes calming tensions by singing church hymns.
Cotton had been among a small number of women in leadership positions at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the civil rights era, and led the Atlanta-based civil rights group’s Citizenship Education Program.
Xernona Clayton, who was King’s office manager in Atlanta and organised protest marches and fundraisers, remembers her contribution to the movement well. “She had a beautiful voice, and when things got tense, Dorothy was the one who would start up a song to relieve the tension,” said Clayton. “She had such a calming influence in her personality. She had a personality that would lend itself to people listening to her.”
After joing the movement, Cotton became one of King’s closest colleagues and worked at the SCLC for more than a decade. She also commanded respect from her male counterparts within the group, according to Bernard Lafayette Jr., a long-time civil rights leader who is now chairman of the SCLC’s national board.
When King and others ventured to parts of the Deep South that had a reputation for violence against blacks, Cotton was fearless, Lafayette recalled in an interview. “She was very courageous,” he said. “She never hesitated.”
A key focus of Cotton’s work was voter education, and teaching people how to read ballots, how to vote and the importance of voting, said Edwina Moss of Cleveland, Ohio, who was civil rights leader Andrew Young’s administrative assistant.
“She worked a lot in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia — just all over — everywhere where there was a need,” Moss said. “It was extremely important work; it was probably the core foundation of the organisation.”
After King’s death, Cotton remained active in civil rights and education, later serving as an administrator at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
She also spoke about the need to work on King’s legacy. During a commemoration of his death in 1993, she said that people needed to take responsibility for carrying on the mission of racial equality.
“Rosa Parks didn’t wait to see what everybody else was doing. She just did it,” Cotton said of the woman who inspired the bus boycotts by refusing to give her seat to a white man. “We should ask ourselves what we’re doing. It starts with ourselves, our families and our churches.”
Cotton was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina. She and her three sisters were raised by her father after her mother died when she was very young.
She attended Shaw University in Raleigh before earning a bachelor’s degree in English and library science at Virginia State College in 1955. She earned a master’s degree in speech therapy from Boston University in 1960.
She met King when he preached at the church she attended in Petersburg, Virginia, and was invited shortly afterwards to join the staff at the SCLC.
Cotton died in a retirement community in New York.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here