Coretta Scott King dead at 78

Pressed for national holiday
She pushed and goaded politicians for more than a decade to have her husband’s birthday observed as a national holiday, achieving success in 1986. In 1969 she founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and used it to confront hunger, unemployment, voting rights and racism.

“The center enables us to go out and struggle against the evils in our society,” she often said.

She also accused movie and TV companies, video arcades, gun manufacturers and toy makers of promoting violence.

King became a symbol in her own right of her husband’s struggle for peace and brotherhood, presiding with a quiet, stoic dignity over seminars and conferences.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with her husband when he was assassinated, said Tuesday that she understood that every time her husband left home, there was the chance he might not come back. Jackson pronounced her a “freedom fighter.”

“Like all great champions she learned to function with pain and keep serving,” he said, adding: “She kept marching. She did not flinch.”

In Washington, President Bush hailed her as “a remarkable and courageous woman and a great civil rights leader.”

After her stroke, King missed the annual King celebration in Atlanta two weeks ago but appeared with her children at an awards dinner a few days earlier, smiling from her wheelchair but not speaking. The crowd gave her a standing ovation.

Despite her repeated calls for unity among civil rights groups, her own children have been divided over whether to sell the King Center to the National Park Service and let the family focus less on grounds maintenance and more on King’s message. Two of the four children were strongly against such a move.

Flags at half-staff in Georgia
Gov. Sonny Perdue ordered flags at all state buildings to be flown at half-staff and offered to allow King’s body to lie in repose at the Georgia Capitol. There was no immediate response to the offer, the governor’s office said.

NBC VIDEO Remembering Coretta Scott King Jan. 31: Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C. talks to MSNBC-TV's Amy Robach about civil rights icon Coretta Scott King who died Tuesday. MSNBC

King died at Santa Monica Health Institute in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, south of San Diego, said her sister, Edythe Scott Bagley of Cheyney, Pa. She had gone to California to rest and be with family, according to Young.

Coretta Scott was studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music and planning on a singing career when a friend introduced her to King, a young Baptist minister studying at Boston University.

“She said she wanted me to meet a very promising young minister from Atlanta,” King once said, adding with a laugh: “I wasn’t interested in meeting a young minister at that time.”

She recalled that on their first date he told her: “You know, you have everything I ever wanted in a woman. We ought to get married someday.” Eighteen months later, in 1953, they did.

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