Rest In Peace Coretta Scott King
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Rights leader Coretta Scott King dies
Tue Jan 31, 2006 11:12 AM ET
Coretta Scott King passes away
by Karen Jacobs
ATLANTA (Reuters) - 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, died at age 78, friends and family said on Tuesday.
"Her daughter was with her at the time she passed, probably about 1 to 1:15 this morning," said Bishop Eddie Long of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia, the pastor of King's youngest child Bernice.
Andrew Young, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a close friend of the King family, told reporters she died in California.
King suffered a debilitating stroke and heart attack in August. She was last seen in public on January 14 at a dinner marking the Martin Luther King Jr., holiday, where she received a standing ovation from the 1,500 people in the crowd.
Her steely determination, grace and class won her millions of admirers inside and outside the civil rights movement.
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.
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. ... President and Mrs. Bush are deeply saddened by today's news."
Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, called King "a driving force, not just for the civil rights movement, but for the great march toward progress."
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.
Mrs. King, who was in Atlanta at the time, learned of the murder 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.
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