Coretta Scott King dead at 78

A move to Montgomery
The couple moved to Montgomery, Ala., where he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and helped lead the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott that Rosa Parks set in motion when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. With that campaign, King began enacting his philosophy of nonviolent, direct social action.

Over the years, King was with her husband in his finest hours. She was at his side as he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. She marched beside him from Selma, Ala., into Montgomery in 1965 on the triumphant drive for a voting rights law.

Only days after his death, she flew to Memphis with three of her children to lead thousands marching in honor of her slain husband and to plead for his cause.

“I think you rise to the occasion in a crisis,” she once said. “I think the Lord gives you strength when you need it. God was using us — and now he’s using me, too.”

Her husband’s womanizing had been an open secret during the height of the civil rights movement. In January, a new book, “At Canaan’s Edge” by Taylor Branch, put his infidelity back in the spotlight. It said that not long before he was assassinated, King confessed a long-standing affair to his wife while she was recovering from a hysterectomy.

The King family, especially Coretta Scott King and her father-in-law, Martin Luther King Sr., were highly visible in 1976 when former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter ran for president. When an integration dispute at Carter’s Plains church created a furor, Coretta Scott King campaigned at Carter’s side the next day.

She later was named by Carter to serve as part of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, where Young was the ambassador.

Favored trial for husband’s assailant
In 1997, she spoke out in favor of a push to grant a trial for James Earl Ray, who pleaded guilty to killing her husband and then recanted.

W.A. Harewood / AP file Rights activist and U2 singer Bono kisses Coretta Scott King after a news conference in Atlanta in this January 2004 file photo.

“Even if no new light is shed on the facts concerning my husband’s assassination, at least we and the nation can have the satisfaction of knowing that justice has run its course in this tragedy,” she told a judge.

The trial never took place; Ray died in 1998.

King was born April 27, 1927, in Perry County, Ala. Her father ran a country store. To help her family during the Depression, young Coretta picked cotton. Later, she worked as a waitress to earn her way through Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Passing the torch
In 1994, she stepped down as head of the King Center, passing the job to son Dexter, who in turn passed the job on to her other son, Martin III, in 2004. Dexter continued to serve as the center’s chief operating officer.

Martin III also has served on the Fulton County (Ga.) commission and as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, co-founded by his father in 1957. Daughter Yolanda became an actress and the youngest child, Bernice, became a Baptist minister.

In 1993, on the 25th anniversary of her husband’s death, King said the war in Vietnam that her husband opposed “has been replaced by an undeclared war on our central cities, a war being fought by gangs with guns for drugs.”

“The value of life in our cities has become as cheap as the price of a gun,” she said.

In London, she stood in 1969 in the same carved pulpit in St. Paul’s Cathedral where her husband preached five years earlier.

“Many despair at all the evil and unrest and disorder in the world today,” she preached, “but I see a new social order and I see the dawn of a new day.”

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