Late one night in May 1964, Dorothy Cotton stood inside a Methodist church and exhorted a crowd of civil rights marchers to take to the streets with love, not hate. A few blocks away, surrounding the central square in St. Augustine, Fla., was a crowd of about 100 white men and boys, a group of purported Ku Klux Klan members who carried sticks or makeshift clubs, hiding broom handles down their pant legs.
“Don’t judge them by the color of their skin — don’t think of them as white people, but as people with guilt in their souls,” said Cotton, one of a handful of women in the top ranks of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Amid ongoing debate over the Civil Rights Act in Washington, Cotton led 217 marchers through the streets and past the city’s old slave market, where the demonstrators were met by jeers, howling police dogs and sporadic violence.
On that night, according to a subsequent report in the Daytona Beach Evening News, no one was killed. Cotton then led the group in song when they returned to the church.
“This was about the roughest city we’ve had — 45 straight nights of beatings and intimidation,” she later said, recalling the weeks-long protest against segregation. “In church every night we’d see people sitting there with bandages on. Some would sit with shotguns between their legs. … We sang before every night we went out to get up our courage. … After we were attacked, we’d come back to the church, and somehow always we’d come back bleeding, and singing.”
While the male leaders of the SCLC have long been heralded for their work in fighting for racial equality, Cotton played a crucial — if often overlooked — role in the Atlanta-based organization, leading an education program credited with teaching thousands of African Americans about their basic rights of citizenship.
She also became one of the closest confidantes of King, said historian David Garrow, who received the Pulitzer Prize for his 1986 biography of King, Bearing the Cross.
“In the last five years of his life, no one was closer to or more emotionally supportive of Dr. King than Dorothy,” Garrow said in a phone interview.
Cotton died June 10 at a retirement community in Ithaca, N.Y., one day after celebrating her 88th birthday. The Dorothy Cotton Institute, a project of the Center for Transformative Action at Cornell University, announced the death but did not give a precise cause.
Raised in a shotgun shack in the segregated South, Cotton was a protege of Wyatt Tee Walker, a pastor in Petersburg, Va., who led the local chapter of the NAACP and became a prominent champion of civil rights in Virginia. Walker, who died in January, was named executive director of the SCLC in 1960. Cotton followed him to Atlanta and joined the organization’s staff.
In a 2011 interview with the Southern Oral History Program, Cotton recalled that she promised her husband, George Cotton, that the new job would take her away from home for three months. “But I stayed twenty-three years,” she said. “The Movement became my life.” Their marriage ended in divorce.
A onetime teacher, Cotton received a master’s degree in speech therapy from Boston University and was charged with leading the SCLC’s education department, which became known as the Citizenship Education Program. The position made her the only woman in the organization’s executive staff.
“I remember one meeting, Martin said, ‘Dorothy, get me a cup of coffee.’ She said, ‘No, I won’t get you a cup of coffee,’ ” Andrew Young, a fellow SCLC official who became the organization’s executive director and later mayor of Atlanta, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“She was constantly rebelling against the role of being made a second-class citizen. She would tell Dr. King no all the time. So I got the coffee.”
Cotton’s education division was modeled in large part after teaching programs by Esau Jenkins, who worked with children on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, and organizer Septima Clark, an instructor at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee who became the Citizenship Education Program’s supervisor of teacher training.
With Clark and Young, Cotton led monthly five-day workshops in which as many as 60 people studied the U.S. Constitution and African-American history, learned how to read a voting ballot and organize credit unions, were taught the ins-and-outs of community activism, and — not infrequently — danced or played volleyball with a visiting King.
“In short, the purpose of the CEP class is to give instruction necessary for meaningful existence and participation in a democratic society,” read one SCLC pamphlet from the mid-1960s.
“Most important,” the document continued, was the program’s goal of helping participants “realize that THEY THEMSELVES CAN THINK, MAKE DECISIONS, AND THEN ACT.”
Individuals who attended the workshops returned home to teach citizenship classes of their own. By the mid-1960s, according to one SCLC estimate, 2,600 graduates had led workshops that were “attended by 23,000 others.”
Dorothy Lee Foreman was born in Goldsboro, N.C., on June 9, 1930.