Coretta King remembered as ‘great civil rights leader’

Alabama-native Coretta Scott King was “a remarkable and courageous woman, and a great civil rights leader … [who] carried on the legacy of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” President George W. Bush said after news of her death Jan. 31. “Mrs. King’s lasting contributions to freedom and equality have made America a better and more compassionate nation.”
   
King, 78, died at a health center in Mexico, 16 miles south of San Diego, that treats diseases considered beyond the help of traditional medicine, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. She was found dead by her daughter Bernice in the early morning hours of Jan. 31, family friend and former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young told the newspaper.
   
King suffered a major stroke and heart attack last August that  impaired her speech and right side. Several months earlier, the Atlanta paper reported, she had been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which causes the heart to quiver instead of beat regularly.
   
Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue ordered that flags at state facilities be flown at half-staff in her honor until sunset following her funeral. “Coretta Scott King was one of the most influential civil rights leaders of our time,” he said. “Mrs. King was a gracious and kind woman whose calm, measured words rose above the din of political rhetoric. For decades, she proudly bore the torch of her husband’s legacy. Now she has passed it on to a new generation to keep the dream alive.”
   
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said in a statement to Baptist Press, “The nation as a whole … owes an incalculable debt of gratitude to Mrs. Coretta Scott King and her husband, Dr. King. Their collective courage, bravery and Christian dignity helped to guide America through one of the more difficult and heartbreaking periods of our history. Together, Dr. and Mrs. King did more for racial reconciliation in this nation than any couple in our history. … It would have been impossible for Dr. King to carry out his ministry to the nation and the world without the invaluable support and counsel of his wife.”
   
Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, in rural Heiberger to a family that had more resources than many other blacks in the segregated South of the time. She attended a private school run by missionaries in nearby Marion and followed her older sister, Edythe, to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Her sister had been the first black student to enroll at the school, long known for its liberal social activism.
   
King graduated with a degree in music and education. She met her future husband in 1952 when she was studying voice on a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and he was working on his doctorate at Boston University. They were wed and returned to her native state in 1954 when he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery — the city from which he would rise to prominence in the struggle for civil rights.
   
King and their four children endured the upheaval sparked by her husband’s civil-rights advocacy. In 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott, she and daughter Yolanda escaped injury when a dynamite bomb exploded on their porch. (BP, ABP)