The Senior Constituency Group of the AFL-CIO

MARCH WOMEN HISTORY MONTH

The press called Betty Shabazz, Coretta Scott King, and Myrlie Evers "the widows." Between them, they held six degrees, ran three national institutions, raised sixteen children alone, and spent a combined sixty years fighting for justice their husbands didn't live to see.

The press called them "the widows."

That was the word. Not leaders, not organizers, not the women who held entire movements together with their bare hands while raising children alone.

The Washington Post, the evening news, the magazine profiles, they all reached for the same lazy shorthand. The widows.

In January 1995, at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, a photographer named Susan Ross raised her camera at the King Center's annual Salute to Greatness Dinner and captured something the American press almost never bothered to record. Four women, together in the same frame, not grieving, not memorializing, not standing solemnly behind a podium with their hands folded, but laughing.

Betty Shabazz, Dorothy Height, Myrlie Evers, and Coretta Scott King. Sharing a good time, as the original caption would later describe it, with a simplicity that almost disguises how extraordinary the moment was.

Consider what the word "widow" erases. It erases the fact that Coretta Scott King was a trained concert vocalist who studied at the New England Conservatory of Music before she ever met Martin.

It erases the fact that Betty Shabazz earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts while raising six daughters as a single mother. It erases Myrlie Evers finishing her bachelor's degree at Pomona College while fighting for thirty-one years to convict the man who murdered her husband in their driveway.

It erases Dorothy Height entirely, because Height never married, and so the framework of "widow" could not even contain her. Which may be why the press so often pretended she was not in the room at all.

But she was always in the room.

Dorothy Height was 82 years old the night that photograph was taken. She had been president of the National Council of Negro Women since 1957, which means by 1995 she had held that position for thirty-eight years.

She had helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, working alongside Bayard Rustin on logistics, raising funds through her vast network, offering the NCNW headquarters as a planning space. On that August day, when more than 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, Dorothy Height sat on the platform behind the speakers as the only woman.

She was not invited to speak. The men she had helped organize the march with, the men whose disputes she had mediated and whose egos she had managed, did not think to hand her the microphone.

She never made a public fuss about it. But decades later, she would write that the March on Washington had been an eye-opening experience about sexism within the movement itself.

Height had met Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune on the very same day in the late 1930s, when she was a young social worker at the Harlem YWCA. Bethune took one look at her and said, in essence, come with me.

Height spent the rest of her life following that directive, not behind anyone, but alongside them, building institutions that would outlast every headline. She directed the full integration of every YWCA center in the country by 1946.

She counseled Eisenhower, Johnson, and Clinton, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994, just months before this photograph was taken. And yet for decades, when the story of the movement was told, the public remembered the Big Six, the men, and forgot the woman who had been the only consistent female presence among them.

Now look at who Height is standing beside in that photograph. Coretta Scott King, who in 1995 was sixty-seven years old and had spent twenty-seven of those years without Martin.

Twenty-seven years of carrying a legacy that the whole world felt it owned a piece of. She had built the King Center from nothing, established the Salute to Greatness Award herself in 1983, and lobbied for years until the federal government finally approved the King Holiday, first celebrated in January 1986.

She fought for it through congressional resistance, through a veto threat, through the argument that a Black preacher did not deserve what the country had given no other private citizen since George Washington. She won.

And then she spent the rest of her life making sure the holiday meant something beyond a day off from work.

The dinner where this photograph was taken was her event, in her husband's name, at the center she had built. But Coretta was never just the keeper of Martin's flame.

She spoke out for women's rights, for LGBTQ rights, against apartheid in South Africa, and for economic justice with a clarity that sometimes made even her allies uncomfortable. She was not a monument.

She was a strategist, a mother of four, and a woman who, according to her daughter Bernice, loved to giggle when she was with her friends. Especially with Betty.

Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King found each other in the years after their husbands were killed, and their friendship became one of the most quietly radical acts of the entire civil rights era. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had been framed by the American press as opposites, as enemies, as the angel and the agitator, depending on who was telling the story.

Their widows refused that framing. They called each other, they visited, they wrote letters, and Coretta signed things to Betty's family with the words "Love, Aunt Coretta."

They would just giggle, Bernice King said years later. She became a best friend to my mom.

But Betty Shabazz walked into that 1995 dinner carrying something no one in the room could have fully understood. Just days earlier, her daughter Qubilah had been arrested by the FBI, accused of conspiring to assassinate Louis Farrakhan.

The accusation tore open every wound Betty had spent thirty years trying to close, every question about the Nation of Islam's role in Malcolm's death, every ounce of resentment she had carried since February 21, 1965. That was the day she watched her husband get shot in the Audubon Ballroom while she threw herself over their daughters on the floor.

She had been pregnant with twins that day. She had four small girls already, no savings, no life insurance, and a country that could not decide whether her husband was a prophet or a threat.

And Betty Shabazz got up. She finished her undergraduate degree at Jersey City State College, then earned her doctorate.

She became an associate professor of health sciences at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, a school named for the husband of one of the other women in this photograph. She spent decades as an educator, an administrator, a fundraiser, and a public voice for human rights while carrying the specific grief of a woman who had seen her husband's murder with her own eyes.

In January 1995, with her daughter's arrest making national headlines, Betty Shabazz came to Atlanta anyway. She sat at that table, she was in that photograph, and she found a way to share a good time.

Two years later, she would be dead. Her ten-year-old grandson Malcolm, the same child she had taken in after Qubilah's crisis, set a fire in her Yonkers apartment.

Betty suffered severe burns over eighty percent of her body and died three weeks later on June 23, 1997. She was sixty-one years old.

More than two thousand people filled Riverside Church in New York for her memorial. Coretta Scott King was there, and so was Myrlie Evers, along with Maya Angelou, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, four New York City mayors, and a tribute from the President of the United States.

At the service, Myrlie leaned into Coretta and called Betty the third member of their sisterhood of sorrow.

Myrlie Evers knew about sorrow with a precision that most people cannot imagine. Her husband Medgar was the first of the three men to be assassinated, shot in the back in his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963, while Myrlie and their three children were inside the house.

Their son Darrell, who was nine years old, was the first to reach his father's body.

The killer, a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith, was tried twice in the 1960s. Both times, all-white juries deadlocked, and he walked free.

Myrlie Evers spent the next three decades refusing to let that be the end of the story. She moved her children to California and earned her degree from Pomona College.

She worked as a corporate executive, a Los Angeles city commissioner managing a billion-dollar budget, a journalist, and a national advocate. And all the while, she kept pushing for a new trial.

When prosecutors told her the transcript from the original trial was missing, she produced one she had kept in a safe deposit box since the 1960s.

In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted. Myrlie Evers looked toward the sky and said, Medgar, I've gone the last mile of the way.

One month after this photograph was taken, in February 1995, Myrlie was elected chairman of the NAACP's national board of directors, the first woman to hold the position. She won by a single vote.

The organization was in crisis, mired in financial scandal, its membership halved, its debt ballooning past four million dollars. Her second husband, Walter Williams, had been dying of prostate cancer throughout her campaign, and he died two days after her election.

So when Myrlie Evers stood in that photograph at the King Center dinner, smiling beside women who understood exactly what it cost to keep standing, she was weeks away from a grief she had not yet experienced and a fight she was about to inherit. She would go on to eliminate the NAACP's debt, restore its credibility, and step down three years later saying she had completed her mission.

In January 2013, she delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama's second inauguration. She was the first woman and first non-clergy member ever asked to offer that prayer for the nation.

Four women in a photograph. Between them, they had buried three husbands to assassins' bullets and one to cancer.

They had raised sixteen children without the men they loved. They had built institutions, won legal battles that took decades, organized marches, written books, earned advanced degrees, managed million-dollar budgets, counseled presidents, and endured a level of public scrutiny that would have broken anyone who did not have iron running through their spine.

And in that photograph, they are not performing any of it. They are just together.

That is what the word "widow" could never hold. It could never hold the way Coretta signed her letters to Betty's family, or the thirty-one years Myrlie spent with a trial transcript in a safe deposit box, waiting.

It could never hold Dorothy Height's hat on the platform at the March on Washington, or the quiet fury of being the only woman at the table and still not being handed the microphone. It could never hold the laughter.

Susan Ross understood this. She called herself the PhotoGriot, after the West African tradition of the griot, the oral historian who carries the culture's memory through storytelling.

Ross grew up in Atlanta during the movement, the daughter of professors at Atlanta University, a neighbor to the King children, a witness to desegregation from the inside. She spent forty years documenting what the mainstream press consistently failed to see, the everyday humanity of Black public life.

This photograph was one of those moments. Not the speech, not the podium, not the event itself, but the after, the between, the part where four women who had carried impossible weight simply existed in each other's company.

Betty Shabazz is gone. She has been gone since 1997.

Coretta Scott King followed in 2006, taken by ovarian cancer at seventy-eight. Dorothy Height lived to ninety-eight, passing in 2010, her funeral held at Washington National Cathedral with President Obama delivering the eulogy.

Myrlie Evers-Williams, the last of the four, turned ninety-two in 2025 and remains a private but enduring presence. She is the final living link to that sisterhood.

There is no replacing what they built. Not just the institutions, the King Center, the NCNW, the restored NAACP, the Medgar Evers Institute, but the thing underneath all of it.

The trust between women who understood each other's grief without needing to explain it. The phone calls, the visits, the willingness to show up at a dinner in Atlanta when everything in your life is falling apart, because the women at that table are the only ones who truly know.

The press called them the widows.

They called each other sister.

Community Forum on Identification of Overburdened Communities for HEAL and CCA

 Upcoming community forums on March 11 and March 12, hosted by the Washington State Department of Ecology. We will discuss budget equity reporting under the HEAL Act and the Climate Commitment Act, and how overburdened communities may be identified for this specific process. Please forward this invitation to others who may be interested in attending. If you’re unable to attend the online community forum, you can register, and we will send the materials and recording to you. 

 March 11, 2026, from 6:00 - 7:00 p.m. PT

Register for our March 11 online community forum

March 12, 2026, from 10:00 - 11:00 a.m. PT

Register for our March 12 online community forum

The presentation content will be the same for each forum.

Please note: This process and determination is completely separate and distinct from the identification of overburdened communities highly impacted by air pollution, through which the Air Quality Program identified 16 communities in 2023. It is also distinct from other maps and determinations of overburdened communities by other entities and for other purposes outside of tracking expenditures under CCA and HEAL. Additionally, this process should not be confused with the Environmental Health Disparities map maintained by the Department of Health. For questions or concerns, contact Ashley Fent at ashley.fent@ecy.wa.gov.