Coretta Scott King dies

Coretta Scott King, who surged to the front of the fight for racial equality in America after her husband Martin Luther King Jr was murdered in 1968, died at age 78, friends and family said yesterday.

"Her daughter was with her at the time she passed, probably about 1 to 1:15 this morning," said Bishop Eddie Long of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia, the pastor of King's youngest child Bernice.

Andrew Young, a former US ambassador to the United Nations and a close friend of the King family, told reporters she died in California.

Ms King suffered a debilitating stroke and heart attack in August. She was last seen in public on January 14 at a dinner marking the Martin Luther King Jr, holiday, where she received a standing ovation from the 1,500 people in the crowd.

Her steely determination, grace and class won her millions of admirers inside and outside the civil rights movement.

Representative John Lewis, a Democratic congressman from Georgia and civil rights leader, said her death was "a very sad hour."

"Long before she met and married Dr King, she was an activist for peace and civil rights and for civil liberties," he told CNN. At the White House, Dan Bartlett, counsellor to the president, told Fox television: "President Bush and first lady Laura Bush were always heartened by their meetings with Mrs King... President and Mrs Bush are deeply saddened by today's news." Senator Edward Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, called Ms King "a driving force, not just for the civil rights movement, but for the great march toward progress."

Coretta Scott King played a back-up role in the civil rights movement until her husband was assassinated on a Memphis motel balcony on April 4, 1968.

Mrs King, who was in Atlanta at the time, learned of the murder in a telephone call from the Reverend 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 Jr.," she felt she had to step fully into the civil rights movement.

She created a memorial and a forum in the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. The center has archives containing more than 2,000 King speeches and is built around the King crypt and its eternal flame.

Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, near Marion, Alabama. Spending much of her early years on a farm, she saw little prejudice until she and her sister were sent into town to board with a family while attending Lincoln High School, a black school in the segregated South.

"It was awful," she said of living in Marion. "Every Saturday we would hear about some black man getting beat up, and nothing was done about it."