In death, Coretta King still setting historic firsts

By Pat Reber Feb 4, 2006, 14:34 GMT

Washington - Coretta Scott King, a major force in the civil rights movement and the widow of slain civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr., will continue to make history in death.

On Saturday, she was to lie in state at the Georgia state Capitol - the first woman and first African-American to receive the honour in the southern state that once was among the most segregated in the country, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Friday.

King died Monday at age 78 as the result of ovarian cancer and a stroke that had crippled her since last summer, her family has said.

She died five days after checking into an alternative clinic in Mexico that has since been closed down, according to a person answering the telephone at a California office for the Hospital Santa Monica. The director of the clinic was Kurt W. Donsbach, who has no medical degree and has been investigated and charged by U.S. justice officials for practicing medicine without a license, the Journal- Constitution reported earlier this week.

The family said they sought care there after her US physicians declared her condition 'terminal.'

Given her national stature as a key leader of the broad social movement that overthrew racial segregation and opened doors to minorities in all walks of life, some have expressed surprise that her body won't lie in state in the nation's Capitol in Washington, D.C. - as did civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, who died in November.

A spokesman for the Congressional Black Caucus said the family had not made such a request.

After lying at the Georgia state Capitol on Saturday, King's body will go to the Ebenezer Baptist Church for viewing Monday, where her husband once preached and next to the King Center that Coretta Scott King founded to continue her husband's legacy of fighting racial discrimination and promoting nonviolence.

Her husband's funeral was held there in 1968 after he was assassinated at a civil rights rally in Tennessee.

King's funeral service will be held Tuesday at Atlanta's largest church where her daughter is an elder - the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, a megachurch that can seat 10,000 people.

The funeral is expected to attract a cast of notables, including singer Stevie Wonder.

The funeral parlour in charge of arrangements, Willie Watkins, said that she wanted to be buried next to her husband at the King Center.

Coretta Scott King played a key role in mobilizing the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. With national stature, she attended many presidential inaugurations - including that of President George W. Bush in 2001.

She was an outspoken critic of the US-led invasion of Iraq, saying war was a 'poor chisel for carving out a peaceful future.'

If some regarded her as 'only' the widow of a fallen hero, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a leading civil rights advocate who once ran for US president, set the record straight earlier this week, calling her an 'authentic freedom fighter.'

Before his assassination, King himself said it would satisfy his 'masculine ego' to say he had led her into the movement. 'But I must say we went (into it) together, because she was as actively involved and concerned when we met as she is now,' he said.

With the death of Parks, the black woman whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in 1955 ignited a large movement against racial segregation, the country has lost two of its most revered leaders in the fight for racial justice.

King lobbied to get the late president Ronald Reagan to support Nelson Mandela's release from prison in South Africa, and appeared with world leaders like Indira Gandhi, the late Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama.

Born Coretta Scott in Marion, Alabama, where she also was raised, she met her husband while studying concert singing in Boston. They were married on June 18, 1953, and lived in Montgomery, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia, which became epicentres of the civil rights movement.

They had four children who have continued working for civil rights through acting, writing, administrating the King Center and other activities. The children disagree, however, over whether the US Parks Service should take over the King Center in Atlanta, which has been struggling for funds.