Politics & Power Quote by Coretta Scott King

King’s line refuses the comforting fiction that civil rights can be negotiated like budget items. “Parceled out in pieces” is deliberately unglamorous language: freedom isn’t a lofty abstraction here, it’s something politicians try to slice, ration, and distribute to keep coalitions intact. The target is “political convenience,” that bland phrase that lets power dress up cowardice as pragmatism. By naming it, she punctures the insider logic of incrementalism when incrementalism is really a strategy for delaying accountability.

The structure matters. She pairs “freedom and justice,” insisting they travel together; you don’t get to praise liberty while tolerating unequal law. Then she moves from principle to indictment: “stand for freedom for one group…deny it to others.” The phrasing traps the listener in a moral mirror. If you claim the banner of freedom, you inherit its obligations. Anything else is not a partial victory but a contradiction.

Context sharpens the intent. As an activist who carried and expanded the movement after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Coretta Scott King consistently argued that civil rights were not a single-issue project. Her politics stretched across race, poverty, war, and later LGBTQ rights, a breadth that often drew criticism from those who wanted the movement to stay “on message.” This quote is a rebuttal to that narrowing. It asserts an ethics of solidarity: justice that depends on exclusions isn’t compromised justice; it’s counterfeit.