Ray Charles, born 1930 in Albany GA, winner of three Grammy Awards, was blind from childhood and for 20 years was addicted to heroin. He managed to kick the habit after seeing how the devastation of drug use was hurting his family.

He started playing the piano at three years old and after he lost his vision at age seven, he never lost his love for music. He didn’t confine his art to one genre but varied from blues to spirituals to country and won a Grammy in country music for I Can’t Stop Loving You in 1962.

In 1981, he was awarded a star on Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame. Ray was an independent thinker and activist. “Blind people can do 98 percent of anything sighted people can do,” he once told me. Drown in My Own Tears, which he wrote in memory of his deceased mother, was my favorite Ray Charles song. In 2015, I was honored to preach at a church in Los Angeles with his son Ray Jr., a minister. Ray died at 73 in Beverly Hills. CA. on June 10, 2004.

Read more about Ray Charles in our exclusive interview only available in my book, And Still We Rise.

My Life, My Love, My Legacy: The Memoirs of Coretta Scott King

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Authentic Autograph by the Author Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds

Born in 1927 to daringly enterprising parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott had always felt called to a special purpose. While enrolled as one of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, she became politically and socially active and committed to the peace movement. As a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music, determined to pursue her own career as a concert singer, she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs as well as shared racial and economic justice goals, she married Dr. King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, and so much more.

As a widow and single mother of four, she worked tirelessly to found and develop The King Center as a citadel for world peace, lobbied for fifteen years for the US national holiday in honor of her husband, championed for women’s, workers’ and gay rights and was a powerful international voice for nonviolence, freedom and human dignity.

Coretta’s is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an extraordinary black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who, in the face of terrorism and violent hatred, stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful every day of her life.