Coretta Scott King's Legacy Celebrated in Final Farewell

Behind them, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and a 200-member choir added further power to the event, especially when violins, drums, horns and woodwinds mixed with the voices and clapping hands of 10,000 people singing "Amazing Grace" and "How Great Thou Art."

Ingrid Dove, 57, a social worker who found a front seat in the balcony, kept leaping to her feet and wiping away tears. "Awesome," she said later. "So many have come to pay their respects for the work Mrs. King has done around the world."

A Who's Who of civil rights legends also spoke: Lowery; Dorothy Height, chairman of the National Council of Negro Women; former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young; and poet Maya Angelou. Even more attended: former Democratic presidential candidates Jackson and Sharpton; NAACP President Bruce S. Gordon; and Gordon's predecessor, Kweisi Mfume.

Stevie Wonder performed a rendition of the spiritual "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," and the Rev. Robert Schuller, the noted television preacher who founded the Crystal Cathedral, gave the benediction.

The Rev. Bernice King, the daughter who was pictured in her mother's lap during her father's funeral, delivered the eulogy. Local television and radio stations broadcast the entire service.

Bernice King, a co-pastor of New Birth Missionary, compared the ovarian cancer that led to her mother's death to the "materialism . . . greed, elitism, arrogance, militarism, poverty" and racism that she said are overtaking the nation.

"We are not reproducing anything because a cancer is eating away at us," she said.

Later, in the activist style that characterized her parents, she preached that her mother died seeking alternative care at a hospital in Mexico because conventional medicine was not working, in the same way that conventional ways of healing the world's problems, through threats and military action, are not working, she said.

In her conclusion, she called her mother a spiritual pioneer who built Atlanta's Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in her father's memory against the wishes of his colleagues at the SCLC "who told her to stay at home and raise her children."

Like the civil rights movement, Coretta Scott King's funeral relied heavily on the insights of women. Attilah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, brought mourners to tears with her testimony about how King reached out to her as a surrogate mother when her own mother died from burns suffered in a fire.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin delivered the first speech that brought people to their feet. She rattled off the names of deceased women of the movement whom she called the voices of freedom, including Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer. King joined them, she said.

"I am here because they lived, and I am here because they struggled."

King's body was taken by hearse back to Atlanta and transferred to a horse-drawn carriage for a final trip down Auburn Avenue, the cradle of the civil rights movement. She will be laid to rest in a temporary crypt beside her husband's at the King Center. A permanent crypt will be built later.