Dorothy Cotton, who worked closely with The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., taught nonviolence to demonstrators before civil rights marches and sometimes calmed tensions by singing church hymns, has died. She was 88.
Cotton died Sunday afternoon at the Kendal at Ithaca retirement community in New York, said Jared Harrison, a close friend who was at her bedside. Harrison said she had battled illnesses recently but didn’t specify a cause of death.
Cotton was among a handful of women on the executive staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the civil rights era, and she led the Atlanta-based civil rights group’s Citizenship Education Program.
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