Coretta Scott King & Auset: Stewardship, Continuity, and the Long Work of Repair
Black History Month often gravitates toward moments of rupture—marches, speeches, assassinations, court rulings. Necessary moments, yes. But history is not sustained by rupture alone. What comes after the break is just as decisive.
This is where the pairing of Coretta Scott King and Auset becomes instructive.
CORETTA SCOTT KINGentered public consciousness as the grieving widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a role the media often fixed as her defining identity. Yet she leveraged her visibility to advocate for labor rights, anti-war policy, and international human rights. Her public mourning became a platform for institutional and global influence.
AUSET is a central deity in Kemetic cosmology, renowned for her strategic role in the resurrection of Ausar (Osiris). After his murder and dismemberment, she located and reassembled his body, enacted rites of restoration, and conceived Heru (Horus), securing dynastic continuity. Her actions laid the political and spiritual groundwork for Heru’s eventual reclamation of the throne.
Auset (the Greeks called her Isis) is generally remembered today as a symbol of wifely devotion for working tirelessly to both restore and avenge the death of her husband. While this is true to the story, Auset is not given her due as a God figure, a ruler and a master strategist with patience enough for the long game. She gathered her siblings and carried out a multi-pronged plan to bring her husband back to life, reclaim the throne for her son and establishing a path to the afterlife (as gods do) And all while working through grief and loss.
Coretta Scott King’s life mirrors this energy with striking clarity.
After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the public imagination often expects a widow to recede—to become a living symbol of grief. Coretta did allow her grief to be publicly shared, but she also became the movement’s moral horizon, linking civil rights to labor justice, anti-war activism, and global human rights. She insisted that the struggle was not finished simply because one voice had been silenced.
This pairing of Auset with Coretta Scott King offers a corrective to how leadership is imagined. While charismatic disruption is often needed to draw attention and sway minds, without integration, protection, and sustained vision, no disruption endures. And lasting change moves further away.
Obviously, the history of Black History is too broad to be captured in a single month but perhaps it can be used as a time to hone the questions history demands be answered for our future.
Who disrupted the system?
Who carried the future through the debris left behind?
Coretta Scott King’s legacy is one response to those questions. And we can use Auset’s energy to move us forward.