Jonathan Majors should keep Coretta Scott King’s name out of his mouth — LEONARD GREENE

As we prepare to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday on Monday, I am reminded of an opportunity I had years ago to meet his widow, Coretta Scott King. The occasion was a civic luncheon at which I was honored with an invitation to sit at her table with about six or seven other guests. I don’t remember what we talked about.

I don’t remember what was on the menu. What I do remember was another guest at the table, a Black man just a few years older than me, who insisted on calling her “Coretta.” Mrs. King, as everyone else at the table and the room called her, continued to talk and eat, a testament to her grace and dignity.

Meanwhile, I sat seething, hoping for a waiter to spill hot coffee in the other man’s lap. Fast forward to last week, when disgraced Marvel movie actor Jonathan Majors invoked the same name to describe his new girlfriend, actress Meagan Good. “She’s an angel,” Majors told ABC News. “She’s held me down like a Coretta.

I’m so blessed to have her. The relationship is still fresh, but you know, I think I found her.” For me, it was like being at that luncheon all over again. I was equally appalled. It wasn’t his first Coretta comparison. Before a Manhattan jury convicted Majors last month of assaulting his former girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, in a domestic violence case, prosecutors played audio of a conversation he had with Jabbari during which he outlined his expectations.

“Coretta Scott King, do you know who that is?” Majors told Jabbari on the recording. “That’s Martin Luther King’s wife. Michelle Obama, Barack Obama’s wife. I’m a great man. A great man. I am doing great things, not just for me but for my culture and for the world. That is actually the position I’m in.

The woman who supports me needs to be a great woman.” After the ABC News interview, the social media backlash was swift. It included a response from someone well versed on all things Coretta Scott King. “My mother wasn’t a prop,” Bernice King, the Kings’ youngest daughter and leader of The King Center in Atlanta, wrote in a social media post.

“She was a peace advocate before she met my father and was instrumental in him speaking out against the Vietnam War. Please understand, my mama was a force.” Since that luncheon with Mrs. King, I’ve wondered what that guest would have done if Andrew Young, an MLK lieutenant who went on to become a United Nations ambassador and the mayor of Atlanta, had been at our table.

Would he have called him “Andy?” Young, in his book “An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America,” recalled Mrs. King’s struggles after her husband was assassinated. There was tension between the new widow and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that King had left behind.

“Money was coming in as a result of Martin’s death, and Coretta needed it for her family,” Young wrote. “The board wanted to use Coretta to raise money for SCLC, but they didn’t want her to play any kind of policy role in the organization. The men in SCLC were incapable of dealing with a strong woman like Coretta, who was insisting on being treated as an equal.” “She was strong,” Young wrote.

“If not stronger than he was.” In other words, she wasn’t some “ride or die” chick just holding it down for her man. She was a civil rights icon worthy of the world’s gratitude and respect..