Coretta Scott King remembered at church where husband preached

By The Associated Press

Posted 11:35AM on Monday 6th February 2006 ( 19 years ago )

On the street Martin Luther King Jr. was born, preached and buried, tens of thousands waited for hours in a freezing rain Monday to say goodbye to his widow, Coretta Scott King, as her family and celebrities staged a stirring musical tribute.During the three-hour memorial in a new addition of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Gladys Knight sang "You're the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me" and friend Oprah Winfrey delivered her remembrances of "the first lady of the civil rights movement.""I hope you know how much I loved your mother," Winfrey said from the stage to the King children _ Yolanda, Martin III, Dexter and Bernice King."For me, she embodied royalty. She was the queen. ... You knew she was a force," she said. "She leaves us all a better America than the America of her childhood."The memorials end with her funeral Tuesday, a week and a day after the 78-year-old King died at a Mexican clinic after battling ovarian cancer and the effects of a stroke. Services will be held in the 10,000-seat New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in suburban Lithonia, where the Kings' youngest child, Bernice, is a minister.Coretta Scott King's body will then be placed in a crypt along Auburn Avenue near her husband's tomb at the King Center, which she built in his honor next to Ebenezer.President Bush ordered that flags nationwide be flown at half-staff all day Tuesday. He planned to attend the funeral along with an impressive list of politicians, civil rights leaders and celebrities, including former presidents Bush, Clinton and Carter and 14 U.S. senators. Among those scheduled to speak were President Bush and poet Maya Angelou. Performing will be musician Stevie Wonder and gospel singer Bebe Winans.The final remembrances followed a weekend in which 42,000 mourners walked past King's open casket at Georgia's gold-domed Capitol, where she became the first woman and the first black person to lie in honor there.More than 46,000 others paid their last respects Monday during a public viewing in the old sanctuary at Ebenezer, where Mrs. King's body _ resplendent in a pink suit _ lay directly beneath the pulpit where Martin Luther King Jr. preached from 1960 until his assassination in 1968.At times the line to see King's body was estimated at one mile long, said National Park Service spokeswoman Saudia Muwwakil.First in line was 51-year-old Jackie Treen of Severn, Md., who flew to Atlanta just to see King's body."I'm an African-American woman married to a white man for 30 years," said Treen, who was 14 when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. "I have to be here. Martin and Coretta made it possible for me to have what I have."The afternoon was filled with moving gospel and secular salutes before a standing-room-only crowd of 1,700 in new sanctuary across the street.Winfrey laughed as she told how she once persuaded King to get a new hairdo on her TV show. And she became emotional when she told how King, in the week before her death, sent her a handmade quilt that her husband's mother had passed down.Religious leaders from around the country also brought their condolences and read Bible scriptures chosen by the family to the capacity crowd.As the service concluded, King's daughter Yolanda _ flanked by her siblings _ told the audience: "I know it is the prayers of so many of you and from all over the world that carried her safely home. We knew firsthand the enduring power of love. We stood in the sunshine of her being."Monday night at another service, about 1,500 people listened as friends of King praised her for helping her husband pursue his dream.Among them was Andrew Young, a lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr. who went on to become a congressman, ambassador to the United Nations and Atlanta mayor. He said: "She knew the suffering of the Old South and she knew you couldn't let hate get to you."After more than three hours of speeches and songs, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton galvanized the crowd with fiery speeches that blasted the government and public figures for trying to make the King legacy their own while doing nothing for world peace of poor black Americans."We can't let them take her from us and reduce her to their trophy and not our freedom fighter," Jackson said.Both he and Sharpton drew standing ovations when they lambasted the Bush administration for the war in Iraq and its failures in providing relief to hurricane victims in New Orleans. They called upon those present to pay real tribute to the Kings by comparing their fight for equality and non-violence."This is not a celebrity funeral. This is us coming to say thank you to a woman who took a bullet in her husband and kept on marching," Sharpton said.Between the King tombs is the eternal flame that was placed there years ago in Martin Luther King Jr.'s honor. On the crypt, inscribed in black, is the Bible passage First Corinthians 13:13, which reads: "And now abide Faith, Hope, Love, These Three; but the greatest of these is Love."

http://accesswdun.com/article/2006/2/130490