Martin Luther King Jr. biographer David J. Garrow writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Just moments after the news of Coretta Scott King’s death, the first inquiring e-mail arrived: How long would it be before the woman some King scholars have for years privately thought of as “the other wife” either stepped forward or was identified by some unprincipled news outlet?
Her story is not exactly secret; it’s one that was known to dozens if not hundreds of people even before Martin Luther King Jr.’s tragic assassination on April 4, 1968. A number of biographers and historians (myself included) have met and interviewed her, and several have made reference to her. But although she was his most important emotional companion during the last five years of his life, her identity has remained hidden for even longer than that of Watergate’s “Deep Throat.”