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Mother of a movement carried a legacyKing, who led rights struggle after a tragedy, dies at 78By Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe February 1, 2006 Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., who after her husband's murder became one of America's best-known civil rights leaders in her own right and an international symbol of the struggle for social justice, died in her sleep late Monday night. She was 78. Mrs. King's sister, Edythe Scott Bagley, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that her sister died at Hospital Santa Monica, a holistic health center, in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, near San Diego. Mrs. King had suffered a major stroke and heart attack in August. Doctors said she died of ovarian cancer. In a statement, President Bush hailed Mrs. King as ''a remarkable and courageous woman, and a great civil rights leader." He lauded Mrs. King's ''lasting contributions to freedom and equality [which] have made America a better and more compassionate nation." Poet Maya Angelou, speaking on ABC's ''Good Morning America," said of Mrs. King's death, ''It's a bleak morning for me and for many people, and yet it's a great morning because we have a chance to look at her and see what she did and who she was." After the assassination of her husband, Mrs. King's chief focus was the preservation of his legacy. ''I am more determined than ever that my husband's dream will become a reality," she said then. She helped raise $15 million for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and served as its president from 1968 to 1995. Dexter Scott King, the King Center's chairman and Mrs. King's younger son, has expressed interest in selling the center to the National Park Service. Both his older brother, Martin Luther King III, and Bernice King have publicly declared their opposition to the sale. Mrs. King was instrumental in Congress's designation of her husband's birthday as a national holiday. ''It's a powerful thing to meet Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr.," Jack Kemp, the 1996 Republican vice presidential nominee, once said. ''It's like sitting down with Mother Teresa." A meeting with Mrs. King helped persuade Kemp, then a congressman, to back the legislation creating the King holiday. The most famous image of Mrs. King is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken at her husband's funeral. She is dressed in black, a transparent veil and coronet-like hat. Sorrowful yet composed, she stares straight ahead as she holds Bernice, her youngest child, in her lap. In many ways, the photograph might be seen as a template for her public image through the remainder of her life, as an admired but distant icon. A 1986 Washington Post article described Mrs. King as ''The Widow: eyebrows arched, her mouth in perpetual droop, her face alternately pained, aloof, beatific." As those capital letters suggest, it was as if she held a sort of nonelective public office. Her regal beauty and the slightly old-fashioned formality of her name underscored that sense. ''Coretta Scott King" seemed almost like a title
David J. Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ''Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference," told the Journal-Constitution in 1993 that ''Coretta has been in a fundamentally static role for years -- widow as an institution. She's created a role for herself which she believes defines her daily existence. . . . She is largely a historical figure." Mrs. King disagreed. ''There are a lot of people who would love to relegate me to a symbolic figure and that's it," she told the Journal-Constitution in the same article. ''I have never been just a symbol of anything. I am a thinker. I have strong beliefs, and I try to be an example of what I believe in." Two years earlier, she had asked a reporter not to use ''the widow" on first reference to her in articles. Mrs. King's concern for social justice extended beyond the civil rights movement. She served as a member of the US delegation to the United Nations in 1977. She helped found and was cochairwoman of the National Full Employment Action Council. ''She was always very progressive," said Andrew Young, US ambassador to the United Nations in the late 1970s and a close associate of Mrs. King's husband. ''She took a stand on gay rights and AIDS and educated the community that it [AIDS] was not a moral punishment but a disease that needs to be addressed and cured." Certainly, Mrs. King was neither naive nor unaware of her stature. A chance encounter with Henry Ford II led to her enlisting him as chief fund-raiser for the King Center. ''You know I want to help, Mrs. King," he told her. ''I'm trying to think of a way." ''I know how," she replied. ''Ask your friends to help." A few years later, Mrs. King was one of a group of African-American leaders at a White House briefing. She was talking when President Jimmy Carter unexpectedly entered the room. As everyone rose, Mrs. King addressed the president. ''If you don't mind, I was speaking when you came in, and I would like to finish my point." Such a marked degree of self-possession earned Mrs. King detractors. By the mid-'90s, some members of the African-American elite in Atlanta were said to refer to her as ''My Husband," mocking what they saw as a penchant for exploiting her widowhood. Mrs. King's global celebrity was vast. The recipient of some 60 honorary degrees, Mrs. King was the first woman to preach from the pulpit at London's St. Paul's Cathedral. Young enlisted her in Atlanta's successful bid to host the 1996 Olympics, bringing members of the International Olympic Committee to see Mrs. King when they were visiting the city. Yet her many distinctions emphasized the somewhat paradoxical nature of Mrs. King's public persona. She had been in many ways a woman ahead of her time. A trained musician who did her graduate work at the New England Conservatory of Music, she had looked forward to a career as a performer and teacher. Instead, Mrs. King found herself in the role of wife, mother, and, ultimately, widow. Indeed, widowhood came to seem a kind of calling. ''I kept struggling with my own ambitions for a long time," Mrs. King said in a 2003 interview with The Boston Globe. ''I knew that getting married would lead me away from performing and the direction I'd hoped to go. But when I finally opened myself to the relationship, I knew this was my direction." As if in compensation, Mrs. King always conducted herself in public with a surpassing seriousness and dignity. This made the contrast especially jarring whenever she or her family was involved in controversy, as when Mrs. King filed suit against Boston University for the return of some 83,000 personal papers her husband had donated to the school in 1964. (A Suffolk Superior Court jury ruled in BU's favor in 1993.) Mrs. King was born on April 27, 1927, in Heiberger, Ala. Her father, Obadiah Scott, operated a general store and sawmill. Her mother, Bernice (McMurray) Scott, was a homemaker. Although they lived in a two-room house and Mrs. King picked cotton to help support the family, the Scotts were relatively prosperous. Scott was the only African-American in the area to own a truck. They suffered for that prosperity, though, as both their house and sawmill were burned down. Arson was strongly suspected in both cases. Excelling at school, Mrs. King was valedictorian of her 17-person high school class. She followed her older sister to Antioch College in Ohio, where she was one of six African-American students. Majoring in music and education, she studied voice, violin, and piano. Student teaching was part of the course of instruction. In her senior year, she was prevented from fulfilling her assignment at an all-white school. ''This incident enhanced my determination to challenge racism," Mrs. King wrote in a 1995 Ebony article, ''and I became active in the campus NAACP chapter and committees dealing with race relations and civil liberties." After earning her bachelor's degree, in 1951, Mrs. King moved to Boston to attend New England Conservatory. A doctoral student at Boston University telephoned her the following January seeking a date. A mutual friend had spoken highly of her. The student's name was Martin Luther King Jr. In her autobiography, ''My Life with Martin Luther King Jr." (1969), Mrs. King described her initial response to her future husband. ''How short he seems" (King was 5 feet 6 1/2 inches tall). ''How unimpressive he looks."
Clearly, he felt otherwise. ''You have everything I want in a wife," he told her on the way home. ''I have to confess, I wasn't much interested in dating a preacher," Mrs. King wrote in a 1999 Essence magazine article. ''But this guy had a sensitivity, intelligence, and seriousness of purpose that you didn't find in other young men of his age." They married a year and a half later. The Kings moved to Montgomery, Ala., where he became pastor of a Baptist church. Three weeks after their first child was born, Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her bus seat to a white man. King was drafted to head what would become the Montgomery bus boycott, giving birth to the modern civil rights movement. Two months into the boycott, a bomb was thrown onto the Kings' front porch. Mrs. King was inside the house with their infant daughter, Yolanda. Neither was harmed. It was not the only time the effect of her husband's work would be felt at home. Mrs. King took a dose of castor oil to induce the birth of her fourth child, Bernice, to ensure it would happen before the 1963 march on Birmingham. More generally, there was the stress of having to raise four children all but single-handed. ''Because Martin was traveling so much after the Movement started," Mrs. King wrote in Essence, ''most of the daily parenting was left to me." The only time Mrs. King was seen to lose her composure in public came in 1960 when her husband was sentenced on a trumped-up traffic charge to hard labor in a Georgia penitentiary. Fearful for his safety in prison, and pregnant with their third child, she broke down in tears in the courtroom. On April 4, 1968, the telephone rang in the Kings' Atlanta home. King was in Memphis, supporting striking sanitation workers. The call was from Jesse Jackson, a King aide. ''Coretta, Doc just got shot. I would advise you to take the next thing smoking." Mrs. King immediately flew to Memphis. Four days after her husband's death, she took what would have been his place at the head of a protest march by the striking workers. The next day, at his funeral, she wept only when a tape of one of her husband's sermons was played. In addition to her sister and her four children, Mrs. King leaves a brother, Obie. Her body is being flown to Atlanta, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Funeral plans have not been completed. Material from wire services contributed to this report. © Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company. Source: GSN |