A Full Partner in The Dream

Determined still to create a lasting legacy, Mrs. King founded the King Center in the basement of her home in 1968.

Some civil rights leaders and others complained that it would divert money from the movement, including the organization her husband founded, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but she pressed on in spite of many obstacles. The scholarly center, which holds King's speeches and other documents about the movement, sits on 23 acres of national parkland near his grave site and family home. Mrs. King served as president of the center for 26 years until stepping down in 1994 and turning the organization over to her youngest son, Dexter.

Her other son, Martin Luther King III, assumed leadership of the center in 2004. The future of the center is now in question amid family disagreements over a potential sale to the National Park Service.

A Steady Voice for Change

Over the years, Mrs. King traveled the world, speaking on college campuses and at churches, meeting with heads of state and political leaders. She supported legislation for full employment and advocated for equal rights and economic justice for women. She disparaged war and promoted world peace. She marched against discrimination in the South and was arrested in the United States for protesting apartheid in South Africa. She became an advocate for the rights of gay men and lesbians, much to the chagrin of some black religious and political leaders and against the preaching of her youngest daughter, Bernice.

For a generation of African American women, who saw her as a picture of dignity and strength draped in black and comforting her young daughter at her husband's funeral, she was "the black Jackie Onassis." More than anything, though, throughout the past 37 years and despite her own significant activism, she was known as "Dr. King's widow."

She probably would not have had it any other way.

She once told Ebony magazine: "I will always be out here doing the things I do, and I'm not going to stop talking about Martin and promoting what I think is important in terms of teaching other people his meaning so they can live in such a way as to make a contribution to our advancement and progress."

Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, in Heiberger, Ala., in a house her father, Obadiah Scott, built in 1920. He and his wife, Bernice McMurry, had married that same year and taken up residence on land that had been in his family for generations.

"By the time I was born, he had saved enough money to buy a truck and was hauling logs and timber for the local sawmill operator," Mrs. King wrote in a memoir.

During the Depression, her father began what he called "truck farming." On its farm, the family raised vegetables as well as hogs, cows and chickens.

As soon as she and her sister and brother were old enough to hold a hoe, they helped out on the farm. At 10, Mrs. King was digging and chopping cotton with the hired workers. She even hired herself out to make money for school supplies.

"I remember one special year when I made seven dollars picking cotton," she said in her book, "My Life With Martin Luther King" (1963). "I was always very strong, and I made a very good cotton picker. Martin used to tease me about it, years later, saying that was why he had married me. He would say, 'If you hadn't met me, you'd still be down there picking cotton.' "