Coretta Scott KingCoretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights, activist Martin Luther Ki

Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights, activist Martin Luther King Jr. , has died. She was 78. Mrs. Bagley said her body would be returned to her home, Atlanta, for entombment next to her husband, whose crypt is at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center there. Mrs. King had been in falling health since suffering a stroke and heart attack last August. She appeared at a Martin Luther King Day dinner on Jan. 14, but did not speak. Andrew Young, the former United Nations ambassador and longtime family friend, said at a news conference this morning that Mrs. King died in her sleep. "She was a woman born to struggle," Mr. Young said, "and she has struggled and she has overcome."

Mrs. King rose from rural poverty in Heiberger, Ala. , to become an international symbol of the civil rights revolution of the 1960's and a fireless advocate for social and political issues ranging from women's rights to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa that followed in its wake. She was studying music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1952 when she met a young graduate student in philosophy, who on their first date told her: "The four things that I look for in a wife are character, personality, intelligence and beauty. And you have them all." A year later, she and Dr. King, then a young minister from a prominent Atlanta family, were married, beginning a remarkable partnership that ended with his assassination in Memphis on April 4,1968. Mrs. King did not hesitate to pick up his mantle, marching, even before her husband was buried, at the head of the striking garbage workers that he had gone to Memphis to champion. She then went on to lead the effort for a national holiday in his honor and to found the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta, dedicated both to scholarship and to activism, where Dr. King is buried.

Coretta Scott was born on April 27, 1927, the second of three children born to Obadiah and Bernice Scott. She grew up in the two-room house her father built on land that had been owned by the family for three generations. From the start there was nothing predictable about her life. The family was poor, and she grew up picking cotton in the hot fields of the segregated South or doing housework. But Mr. Scott hauled timber, owned a country store and worked as a barber. His wife drove a school bus, and the whole family helped raise hogs, cows, chickens and vegetables. So by the standards of blacks in Alabama at the time, the family had both resources and ambitions out of the reach of most others. Some of Coretta Scott's earliest insights into the injustice of segregation came as she walked to her one-room school house each day, watching buses full of white children stir up dust as they passed. She got her first sense of the world beyond rural Alabama when she attended the Lincoln School, a private missionary institution in nearby Marion, where she studied piano and voice and had her first encounters with college-educated teachers and where she resolved to flee to a world far beyond rural, segregated Alabama.

She graduated first in her high school class of 17 in 1945 and then began attending Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where two years earlier her older sister, Edythe, had been the first black to enroll. She studied education and music and after graduation went on to the New England Conservatory of Music, hoping to become a classical singer and working as a mail order clerk and cleaning houses to augment the fellowship that barely paid her tuition.

Her first encounter with the man who would become her husband did not begin auspiciously, as recounted in "Parting the Waters" by Taylor Branch. Dr. King, very much in the market for a wife, called her after getting her name from a friend and announced: "You know every Napoleon has his Waterloo," he said. "I'm like Napoleon. I'm at my Wa

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