Coretta Scott King

Compiled by Art Toalston with reporting by Lawrence Smith & Jill Martin. Copyright (c) 2001 Southern Baptist Convention, Baptist Press

ATLANTA (BP)—Coretta Scott King was “a remarkable and courageous woman, and a great civil rights leader ... [who] carried on the legacy of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” President Bush said after news of her death Jan. 31.

“Mrs. King’s lasting contributions to freedom and equality have made America a better and more compassionate nation,” the president said.

King, 78, died at a health center in Mexico, 16 miles south of San Diego, that treats diseases considered beyond the help of traditional medicine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. She was found dead by her daughter Bernice in the early morning hours of Jan. 31, family friend and former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young told the newspaper.

King suffered a major stroke and heart attack last August that had impaired her speech and right side. Several months earlier, the Atlanta paper reported, she had been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which causes the heart to quiver instead of beat regularly.

King, an Alabama native, met her future husband in 1952 when she was studying voice on a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music and he was working on a Ph.D. at Boston University. They were wed the following year and returned to her native state in 1954 when he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery -– the city from which he would rise to prominence in the struggle for civil rights.

King and her four children frequently endured the upheaval sparked by her husband’s civil rights advocacy, first in 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott, when she and her two-month-old daughter Yolanda escaped injury when a dynamite bomb was thrown onto their porch and exploded.