A nation mourns Coretta Scott King

Karen Jacobs

ATLANTA — Coretta Scott King, who surged to the front of the fight for racial equality in America after her husband Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, has died at age 78, friends and family said on Tuesday.

King died overnight, the family said in a statement. She suffered a debilitating stroke and heart attack in August.

Mrs. King’s steely determination, grace and class won her millions of admirers inside and outside the civil rights movement.

She was last seen in public January 14 at a dinner marking the Martin Luther King Jr., national holiday, where she received a standing ovation from the 1,500 people in the crowd.

Rep. John Lewis, a Democratic congressman from Georgia and civil rights leader, said her death was “a very sad hour.”

“Long before she met and married Dr. King, she was an activist for peace and civil rights and for civil liberties,” he told CNN. “She became the embodiment, the personification (of the civil rights movement after Dr. King’s death) ... keeping the mission, the message, the philosophy ... of nonviolence in the forefront.”

At the White House, Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, told Fox television: “President Bush and first lady Laura Bush were always heartened by their meetings with Mrs. King. What an inspiration to millions of people. I’m deeply saddened by today’s news.”

Coretta Scott King played a back-up role in the civil rights movement until her husband was assassinated on a Memphis motel balcony on April 4, 1968, while supporting a sanitation workers strike.

Mrs. King, who was in Atlanta at the time, learned of the shooting in a telephone call from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a call she later wrote, “I seemed subconsciously to have been waiting for all of our lives.”

As she recalled in her autobiography “My Life With Martin Luther King Jr.,” she felt she had to step fully into the civil rights movement.

“Because his task was not finished, I felt that I must re-dedicate myself to the completion of his work,” she said.

She created a memorial and a forum in the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. The center has archives containing more than 2,000 King speeches and is built around the King crypt and its eternal flame.

Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, near Marion, Alabama. Spending much of her early years on a farm, she saw little prejudice until she reached high school, when she and her sister were sent into town to board with a family while attending Lincoln High School, a black school in the segregated South.

Her father had built up a small trucking business but his success began to irritate poor whites in the area, she said, and, after considerable harassment someone burned down the Scott home on Thanksgiving night 1942.

“I guess I was being prepared for my role when I was growing up, because when we were young children my father’s life was in danger,” Mrs. King once told Reuters.

“A white man threatened him, and he never ran. He was fearless. He said, ‘If you look a white man in the eyes, he can’t harm you.’“

Her sister Edythe won a scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1943, the first black student to attend the school. Two years later, Coretta followed.

But, as the first black at the school to major in elementary education she ran into discrimination that limited the classrooms where she could student teach.

After graduation in 1951, she began studying singing at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

King, who was studying for his doctorate in theology at Boston University, had told a mutual friend he was looking for a wife. The friend gave him Coretta Scott’s phone number, but when he came calling she was not impressed.

“I saw this green car coming up the street and this short man. He leaned over to open the door, and when I got in the car I saw this very young looking man. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I expected to see a man but this is a boy.’“

When he began to speak, however, the young Miss Scott changed her mind.

There was never any doubt, either, that King was not going to be content with the status quo. “Even at the time we were courting,” she said, “Martin was deeply concerned — and indignant — with the plight of the Negro in the United States.”

They were married at her parents’ home on June 18, 1953, and moved to Atlanta, where King was the co-pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church with his father.

The couple eventually had four children: Yolanda Denise, born in 1955, Martin Luther, III, born in 1957, Dexter Scott, born in 1961, and Bernice Albertine, born in 1963.

They moved in 1956 to Montgomery, Alabama, where the 26-year-old minister took over the pulpit at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It was there that he became active in the civil rights movement, involving himself in the Montgomery bus boycott. (Reuters)