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Coretta Scott King dies
31/01/2006 16:22 - (SA)
Atlanta - Coretta Scott King, who surged to the forefront of the fight for racial equality after her husband Martin Luther King jun was murdered in 1968, has died at age 78, United States media reported on Tuesday.
She'd had a stroke and a heart attack in August.
Coretta Scott King played a major back-up role in the civil rights movement until the death of her husband, Martin Luther King, who was assassinated on a Memphis motel balcony on April 4 1968, while supporting a sanitation workers strike.
Mrs King, who was in Atlanta at the time, learned of her husband's shooting in a telephone call from Rev Jesse Jackson, a call she later wrote, "I seemed subconsciously to have been waiting for all of our lives."
As she recalled in her autobiography My Life With Martin Luther King jun, she felt she had to step fully into the civil rights movement.
"Because his task was not finished, I felt that I must rededicate myself to the completion of his work," she said.
Determined to make sure Americans did not forget her husband or his dream of a colour-blind society, she created a memorial and a forum in the Martin Luther King jun Centre for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. The centre has archives containing more than 2 000 King speeches and is built around the King crypt and its eternal flame.
- Reuters
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