Coretta Scott King, Civil Rights Leader’s Widow, Dies

www.achievement.org Coretta Scott King at her husband’s funeral.

Flags at the state capitol and across New York were lowered to half-staff by order of Governor George Pataki in memory of Coretta Scott King, widow of the civil rights leader, who died sometime during Monday night and Tuesday morning. She was 78 years old and had been in declining health since suffering a serious stroke and heart attack in 2005.

Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927 in Perry County, Alabama, where her father ran a country store. To help her family during the Depression, she picked cotton. She left her home state in 1947, after she won a scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and worked as waitress to earn her way. She and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were married June 18, 1953 in the garden of her parents’home in Marion, Alabama. Trained in music, she sang in many concerts and narrated civil rights history to raise money for the cause.

After her husband was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, Coretta Scott King kept his dream alive while also raising their four children, Yolanda Denise, Martin III, Dexter Scott and Bernice Albertine. She was the first woman to deliver a Class Day address at Harvard University and the first woman to preach at a statutory service in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London—in the same pulpit where her husband had preached five years previously. She was a leader in the movement to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday and in 1982 saw the fruition of her dream, the completion of the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Her husband is entombed on its campus.

“I join all New Yorkers and the nation in mourning the passing of Mrs. King, and our thoughts and prayers are with the King family at this difficult time,” Pataki said.