The New York Times snubs Coretta Scott King one last time

This features comes about when C.I. was sorting through what could be recycled and what couldn't. C.I. stops and looks at The New York Times Magazines for December 31, 2006, walks over to Jess and Ty, tosses it to them and ask, "Do you see a problem?"

Yeah, they did. We all did when we found out. No, it's not just C.I. On the cover, the names of sixteen people who passed away in 2006 are listed. Not among those listed: Coretta Scott King.
The sixteen all get write ups inside the "magazine." (Come on people, it's a high brow version of Parade -- it's not really a "magazine.")

The 'magazine' compounds the insult in the intro on page 11 where they write:

This is our 13th annual Lives They Lived issue. Many notable people died over the last 12 months, among them Coretta Scott King, Robert Altman, Ann Richards, Wiliam Styron, Caspar Weinberger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Red Buttons and Augusto Pinochet.

We think everyone listed in that paragraph, even Weinberger and Kirkpatric whom we had no love for, deserve an apology for being classified as "notable" along with butcher Augusto Pinochet.

But that's it for Coretta Scott King.

For those who missed it, when she passed away, the paper was all over every topic in the world. They ran no editorial on CSK, though playwright and pal of then op-ed page editor Gail Collins. Wendy Wasserstein got an editorial. Wasserstein also gets remembered in the issue, for two pages, by Frank Rich whom apparently had no thoughts on Coretta Scott King. No one did, none of the columnists. Bob Herbert, in a column on something else, slipped into a sentence noting she had passed. And? That was it. Paul Krugman couldn't be bothered, Maureen Dowd didn't have the time, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, go down the list. And the paper saw no reason to commission a column by someone outside the paper on Coretta Scott King.

Now for those who think the paper wasn't interested in the King family, shortly before the death of CSK, they were filing tawdry articles about the fate of the King Center. That's the sort of coverage they gave to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as well, in real time, when it mattered. Long after his death, they would trot out his name for 'race' issues, segregating his life to the sixties civil rights movement with a focus on the south, while bending over backwards to ignore his larger concerns about civil rights throughout the nation, his activism on Vietnam, and anything that couldn't let him be portrayed as Little Marty who gave a speech about a dream and then basically went home.

Though we've seen nothing in Wasserstein's works to suggest she was a latter day Shakespeare, will assume by the front page coverage of her death, the Gail Collins column and now Frank Rich's that we must be missing something. But it would be a damn big step on the part of the paper if they would admit that they've intentionally ignored Coretta Scott King's legacy in the same way they've spent decades rewriting that of her late husband's.