Martin Luther King Jr. learned this important lesson from his wife

Plus: What King Charles III learned from his notorious uncle |

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By Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Jonathan Eig’s landmark biography of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., called King: A Life came out on May 16. TIME ran an adapted excerpt on time.com that focuses on King’s wife Coretta Scott King, her deep roots in activism, and how they tried to balance running a household with running a movement. As recounted in Eig’s book, Coretta once recalled MLK asking, “You aren’t totally happy being my wife and the mother of my children, are you?” She responded: “I love being your wife and the mother of your children. But if that’s all I am to do, I’ll go crazy.” Read more about their relationship here.

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FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1967: Johnny Carson "‘People ask me,’ [Carson] says, 'Why don't you have anything controversial on your show?' But all the shows that have tried to exist with that format have failed. Look at Mike Wallace. Look at Les Crane. Anyway, people mistake what controversy means. We've talked about narcotics addiction, we've talked about civil rights, we've talked about liberalizing divorce and abortion laws. I've even discussed my own divorce. But it's all in the way you do it…Once you take yourself too seriously, as a humorist—or a comedian—once you start to pontificate, you lose your value as an entertainer. If you're a big movie star, you can do that sort of thing, because you're an actor: your audience sees you as somebody else, and when you step out of the part you're something different—it won't affect your work. But I'm myself on the show.’” (May 19, 1967) Read More » This week in 1979: Margaret Thatcher “For the first time in history, two women were the principals in the traditional ‘kissing hands upon appointment’—a ceremony in which the leader of the winning party is summoned to Buckingham Palace, there to be designated Prime Minister of Britain by the monarch and asked to form a government. The monarch, of course, was Queen Elizabeth II. The Prime Minister was Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 53, a grocer's daughter from the English Midlands, who last week led her Conservative Party to a decisive victory over James Callaghan's Labor Party. The Tories won a solid majority of 43 seats in the 635-member House of Commons, and Thatcher thereby became not only the first woman to head a British government but the first to lead a major Western nation.” (May 14, 1979) Read More » This week in 1984: Shirley MacLaine “[MacLaine] welcomes the birthday that saddens so many people: ‘I love the idea of 50, because the best is yet to come. I am going to live to be 100, because I want to, and I am going to go on learning.’ In a quiet moment, she says simply, ‘This has been the best year of my life’... MacLaine is not only [an] actress, dancer, author, traveler, political activist, feminist, ex-wife and deliberately unmotherly mother. She is also, she says, "a former prostitute, my own daughter's daughter, and a male court jester who was beheaded by Louis XV of France"—all in past incarnations that she believes she has rediscovered with the aid of mediums, meditation and, in at least one case, acupuncture.’” (May 14, 1984) Read More »

100 Years of TIME Sesame Street In a recent interview with TIME, Big Bird sounds off on what’s new on Sesame Street since the TV show was featured on the Nov. 30, 1970, cover of the magazine Read More »

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