CNN.com - Coretta Scott King dies - Jan 31, 2006Coretta Scott King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., died Monday night in California, according to a former aide and a public relations firm representing the family.
Coretta King, 78, suffered a stroke and a mild heart attack last August. She was receiving further medical treatment in California in her rehabilitation.
"This is a very sad hour," U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia, told CNN on Tuesday."She was the glue. Long before she met and married Martin Luther King Jr. she was an activist," he said. [...] Born in Marion, Alabama, on April 27, 1927, Coretta Scott graduated as valedictorian of her high school class and attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She received a B.A. in music and education and then studied concert singing at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. She got a degree in voice and violin, according to her official biography.
While there, she met a theology student at Boston University, Martin Luther King Jr. They married on June 18, 1953, in her hometown of Marion.
As the young pastor began his civil rights work in Montgomery, Alabama, Coretta Scott King worked closely with him, organizing marches and sit-ins at segregated restaurants while raising their four children: Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott and Bernice Albertine. Mrs. King performed in "Freedom Concerts," singing and reading poetry to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization which Dr. King led as its first president. The family endured the beating, stabbing and jailing of the civil rights leader, and their house was bombed.
When an assassin's bullet killed her husband in Memphis in 1968, just prior to a planned march, Mrs. King organized her husband's funeral, then "went to Memphis and finished the march," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Tuesday. "She was a staunch freedom fighter," he added....
Mrs. Coretta Scott King (The King Center)
"I think, on many points she educated me. When I met her she was very concerned about the things we are trying to do now. I never will forget the first discussion we had when we met was the whole question of racial injustice and economic injustice and the question of peace. In her college days she had been actively engaged in movements dealing with these problems. I must admit---I wish I could say-to satisfy my masculine ego, that I led her down this path; but I must say we went down together, because she was as actively involved and concerned when we met as she is now."
Excerpted from "Martin Luther King, Jr. A Personal Portrait", interview with Arnold Michaelis, 1967.
The University of Georgia and The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc. (c) Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mrs. Coretta Scott King, and Arnold Michaelis
