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, has died at age 78, friends and family said on Tuesday.
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She had suffered a stroke and a heart attack in August, and 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.
Mrs. King's steely determination, grace and class won her millions of admirers inside and outside the civil rights movement.
Rep. John Lewis (news, bio, voting record), a Democratic congressman from Georgia and civil rights leader, said it 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 major back-up role in the civil rights movement until the death of her husband, who 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 her husband's shooting in a telephone call from 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 rededicate myself to the completion of his work," she said.
Determined to make sure Americans did not forget her husband or his dream of a color-blind society, 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.
CHILDHOOD HOME TORCHED IN ARSON
Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, near Marion, Alabama. Spending much of her early years on a farm she saw little racial 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, one of the black schools 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 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."'
Church had always been a major part in young Coretta Scott's life, church and music, and she got a chance to explore the latter in high school.
"Of course, I sang, I always sang," she said but in high school she learned to play the piano. She was about 15 when she became choir director and pianist at her church.
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. One of three blacks in her class, she made friends with whites, dated a white boy during her junior year and worked on her music.
But, as the first black at the school to major in elementary education she ran into racial discrimination that limited the classrooms where she could student teach.
Antioch, she wrote, "gave me an increased understanding of my own personal worth." 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.
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.
Mrs. King occasionally substituted for him as a speaker and sang in a series of Freedom Concerts across the country to raise money for the movement.
In the 1970s she campaigned for Jimmy Carter, who after he was elected appointed her as a public delegate to the U.N. General Assembly, where she devoted much of her time developing relationships with emerging Third World nations.
