Widow Of US Civil Rights Icon King Die
by VOA News
The widow of slain U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta
Scott King, has died at the age of 78 at her home in Atlanta, Georgia.
A statement from her family says she died late Monday. It did not give a
cause of death.
Coretta Scott King had been in poor health in recent months. She suffered a
major stroke last August. Former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young told U.S. television
networks Tuesday that she died in her sleep.
Flags at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change are
flying at half-staff at the news of Mrs. King's death.
A White House spokesman says President and Mrs. Bush are deeply saddened by
the news.
Coretta Scott was born in the southern state of Alabama in 1927, and picked
cotton on the family farm during the Depression. She met her husband, Martin
Luther King Jr., in Boston, Massachusetts, while he was studying theology at
Boston University and she was studying concert singing at the New England
Conservatory of Music.
Dr. King became a church minister and leader of the civil rights movement in
Montgomery, Alabama. Mrs. King and the couple's oldest daughter narrowly escaped
injury when their home was bombed during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956.
After her husband's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, Mrs. King
carried on his civil rights work, becoming a source of inspiration for Dr.
King's followers and a leader in her own right.
Mrs. King is survived by the couple's four adult children - Yolanda Denise,
Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, and Bernice Albertine.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP and AP.
