A private funeral for civil rights icon Dorothy Cotton was held Wednesday at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University.
Dorothy Cotton, a civil rights leader who worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., died on June 10 at the age of 88 at the retirement community Kendal at Ithaca.
About 100 people attended the funeral, including more than a dozen family members who had driven from North Carolina, Virginia and New York.
Cotton was the educational director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, worked with King in his inner circle, and later made her mark in Tompkins County, devoting her time to community involvement in the area and advocating for civil rights around the country through her Ithaca-based Dorothy Cotton Institute.
"You knew her as a civil rights leader," said Gwen Hinton Perry, Cotton's niece. "We know her as our Dorothy, our cousin Dorothy. We knew her as a teacher."
Read the entire article in the Ithaca Journal.
