Agencies

Atlanta, Georgia, Fab 1: Coretta Scott King, who dedicated her life to furthering the legacy of her husband, Martin Luther King Junior, has died. She was 78.

Through her work she became a potent symbol of the struggle for racial equality in her own right.

Mrs King suffered a stroke and heart attack in August. She was last seen in public in mid-January at a dinner marking the Martin Luther King Jr holiday, where she received a standing ovation.

 
Coretta Scott was born on 27 April 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 while attending Lincoln High School, a black school in the segregated South.

Her father had built up a small trucking business but his success began to irritate poor whites, she said, and, after considerable harassment someone burned down the Scott home on Thanksgiving night 1942.

Church and music had always been a major part in young Coretta Scott's life, and after graduating in 1951 from majority white Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

She met Martin Luther King Jnr, who was studying for his doctorate in theology at Boston University, and married him at her parents' home on 18 June 1953. They had four children.

They moved in 1956 to Montgomery, Alabama, where the 26-year-old minister became active in civil rights, involving himself in the Montgomery bus boycott.

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

Her determination to continue his work won her millions of admirers inside and outside the civil rights movement