ATLANTA – Coretta Scott King, who worked to keep her husband’s dream alive with a chin-held-high grace and serenity that made her a powerful symbol of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s creed of brotherhood and nonviolence, died Tuesday. She was 78.
The “first lady of the civil rights movement” died in her sleep during the night at an alternative medicine clinic in Mexico, her family said. Arrangements were being made to fly the body back to Atlanta.
She had been recovering from a serious stroke and heart attack suffered last August. Just two weeks ago, she made her first public appearance in a year on the eve of her late husband’s birthday.
Doctors at the clinic said Coretta Scott King was battling advanced ovarian cancer when she arrived there on Thursday. The doctors said the cause of death was respiratory failure.
News of her death led to tributes to Coretta Scott King across Atlanta, including a moment of silence in the Georgia Capitol and piles of flowers placed at the tomb of her slain husband.
“She wore her grief with grace. She exerted her leadership with dignity,” said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Coretta Scott King’s husband in 1957.
Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King’s top aides, said Coretta Scott King’s fortitude rivaled that of her husband. “She was strong, if not stronger than he was,” Young said.
Coretta Scott King was a supportive lieutenant to her husband during the most dangerous and tumultuous days of the civil rights movement, and after his assassination in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, she carried on his work while also raising their four children.
“I’m more determined than ever that my husband’s dream will become a reality,” the young widow said soon after his slaying.
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.
Coretta Scott King became a symbol in her own right of her husband’s struggle for peace and brotherhood, presiding with an almost regal bearing 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.”
Coretta Scott was studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music and planning on a singing career when a friend introduced her to Martin Luther King, a young Baptist minister studying at Boston University.
“She said she wanted me to meet a very promising young minister from Atlanta,” Coretta Scott 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.
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, Martin Luther King began enacting his philosophy of nonviolent, direct social action.
Over the years, Coretta Scott 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.”
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