Civil rights leader Coretta King dies

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 yesterday.

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 on 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.Representative 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 non-violence in the forefront.”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 Reverend 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 Non-violent Social Change in Atlanta.The centre has archives containing more than 2 000 King speeches and is built around the King crypt and its eternal flame.CHILDHOOD HOME TORCHED 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.”It was awful,” she said of living in Marion.”Every Saturday we would hear about some black man getting beat up, and nothing was done about it.”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.”We were afraid he was going to be killed.”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’.”- Nampa-ReutersShe 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 on 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. Representative 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 non-violence in the forefront.”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 Reverend 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 Non-violent Social Change in Atlanta.The centre has archives containing more than 2 000 King speeches and is built around the King crypt and its eternal flame.CHILDHOOD HOME TORCHED 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.”It was awful,” she said of living in Marion.”Every Saturday we would hear about some black man getting beat up, and nothing was done about it.”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.”We were afraid he was going to be killed.”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’.”- Nampa-Reuters