Coretta Scott King dies

Coretta Scott King, who worked to keep her husband’s dream of racial equality alive decades after his 1968 assassination, died yesterday at a Mexican clinic known for providing alternative treatments for patients with incurable diseases.

Mrs. King, who suffered a serious stroke and heart attack in August and could no longer speak, was 78.

Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young announced the death of Martin Luther King’s widow yesterday morning on NBC’s “Today” Show.

“I understand she was asleep last night, and her daughter went in to wake her up, and she was not able to, and so she quietly slipped way. Her spirit will remain with us,” said Mr. Young, a close friend of the King family.

Mrs. King died at 1 a.m. yesterday at the Santa Monica Health Institute in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, 16 miles south of San Diego, said Lorena Blanco, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana.

Both of Mrs. King’s daughters, Bernice and Yolanda, were at the hospital when she died. Mrs. King’s sister, Edythe Scott Bagley of Cheyney, Pa., told the Associated Press that Mexican law required her sister’s body to be embalmed before being brought back to the U.S.

Arrangements were being made last night to fly the body back to Atlanta.

Flags at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which Mrs. King founded in 1968, flew at half-staff yesterday in her honor. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist also ordered the flags lowered at the U.S. Capitol.

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue ordered flags at all state buildings to be flown at half-staff and offered to allow her body to lie in repose at the Georgia Capitol. There was no immediate response to the offer.

Wanda Smith, co-host of an Atlanta morning radio program on station WVEE-FM, held a live broadcast outside the King center.

“I asked people to bring red roses because Coretta was a red rose,” Mrs. Smith said.

The King family said, “We appreciate the prayers and condolences from people across the country.”

But the family has been divided over whether to keep the King center as a family-run operation or sell it to the federal government. Mrs. King’s children have openly feuded over what will happen after she died.

“I think it kind of had an effect on her. I think what was going on with the children was a burden on her,” said Robert Washington, an Atlanta businessman and family friend. “I wouldn’t say it was a big burden, but I am quite sure it had an effect on her.”

An outpouring of tributes to Mrs. King both as a mother and a civil rights leader in her own right were issued yesterday. They came both from the nation’s top political leaders and from those long involved in the civil rights struggle.

The first words in President Bush’s State of the Union speech last night, after the customary greetings, were a tribute to Mrs. King.

“Today, our nation lost a beloved, graceful, courageous woman who called America to its founding ideals and carried on a noble dream,” Mr. Bush said. “Tonight, we are comforted by the hope of a glad reunion with the husband who was taken from her so long ago, and we are grateful for the good life of Coretta Scott King.”

Julian Bond, chairman of the board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights group, said, “Coretta Scott King was her husband’s partner in life; after his death, she was a fierce protector of his legacy and a promoter of nonviolence.”

D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams hailed the “first lady of the civil rights movement.”

“She was a rare combination of steady strength and determination, grace and dignity and inspirational courage.”

Because of her illness, Mrs. King did not participate in the annual Atlanta celebration of her husband’s birthday this year. He would have been 77.

Her last public appearance was Jan. 14, when she and three of her four children attended an awards dinner in the Georgia capital. Mrs. King smiled from her wheelchair on stage and received a standing ovation.

Mrs. King fought for more than a decade to have her husband’s birthday observed as a national holiday. In 1983, she watched as President Reagan signed the bill into law that created the King holiday. The first such event, which Mr. Reagan had opposed, was celebrated Jan. 20, 1986.

Immediately after Mr. King’s assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968, riots or racial disturbances broke out in cities across the nation. Just days later, Mrs. King and her children were in Memphis, leading a march of thousands in honor of her slain husband.

She pleaded for his cause of nonviolence, and her composure was compared at the time to that displayed by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, after her husband’s assassination in November 1963.

“She was truly the first lady of the human rights movement,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said of Mrs. King.

“She never stopped marching and leading,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in Chicago.

Mr. Jackson, who was with Martin Luther King when he was assassinated, recalled how Mrs. King “walked with her husband during the ordeal of the Montgomery bus boycott” and how their home in Montgomery, Ala., was bombed.

“When Dr. King was stabbed in New York, hit in the head with bricks in Chicago, she, too, absorbed the blows, hovering over their children.”

In recent years, Mrs. King waged a campaign on behalf of James Earl Ray, who confessed to her husband’s killing but later recanted. When he died in 1998, Ray was seeking a new trial. After his death, Mrs. King said a new trial would have established Ray’s innocence.

Mr. Jackson noted that her fight for freedom also extended to those living in tyranny in foreign countries, such as South Africa and Haiti.

“Hers was a voice that will now reverberate through the ages.”

Yesterday, the Maryland House of Delegates in Annapolis observed a moment of silence for Mrs. King. The state Senate, along with legislative bodies across the nation, also paused to remember her.

“We all have to pick up the mantle of Dr. King and also the mantle of Coretta Scott King,” Sen. Ulysses Currie, Prince George’s Democrat, said on the Senate floor.

During their 15 years of married life, the Kings had four children. In addition to their two daughters, they had two sons, Martin Luther King III and Dexter Scott King.

S.A. Miller and Stephen Dinan contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.