Thousands Pay Their Respects to "First Lady of Civil Rights Movement"
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| Mourners view the body of Coretta Scott King at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church February 6, 2006, in Atlanta, Georgia. King's casket lay in Ebenezer Baptist Church, where her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., preached in the 1960s and the civil rights matriarch remained a member until her death. King died January 31 in Mexico at an alternative medicine clinic, where doctors said she was battling advanced ovarian cancer. Photo by Jason Reed-Pool | Getty Images. |
President Bush ordered that flags nationwide be flown at half-staff all day in honor of Coretta Scott King, who died January 30 at the age of 78 after battling ovarian cancer and the effects of a stroke.
The President and First Lady Laura Bush attended the funeral, along with former presidents Bush, Clinton, and Carter and 14 U.S. senators. Maya Angelou, a personal friend of King, was one of the speakers, and Stevie Wonder and gospel singer Bebe Winans performed.
Delivering the eulogy was the Kings’ youngest child, Bernice, who was five when her father was assassinated in 1968 and is perhaps best remembered for the photographs of her lying in her black-veiled mother’s lap during her father’s funeral.
Bernice is a minister at the funeral site, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, a 10,000-seat suburban megachurch about 15 miles east of Atlanta.
A three-hour public viewing of King’s open casket preceded the funeral at the church.
Long lines of mourners formed despite wet, cold weather, the viewing’s early morning hours, and two previous public viewings in three days. Those viewings attracted more than 157,000 mourners, including one at the Georgia Capitol, where King became the first woman and the first Black person to lie in honor there.
"She Embodied Royalty"
The funeral followed a day at Martin Luther King Jr.’s old church, where Gladys Knight and other performers sang musical tributes to King’s widow and where television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, former Atlanta mayor and King lieutenant Andrew Young, and others shared memories of the “first lady of the civil rights movement.”
“For me, she embodied royalty. She was the queen. . . .You knew she was a force,” Winfrey told an audience of 1,700 at a musical celebration in King’s honor.
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.
“She leaves us all a better America than the America of her childhood,” Winfrey said.
At a service Monday night, 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.
After the funeral, Coretta Scott King’s body was placed in a crypt near her husband’s tomb at the King Center, which she built to promote his memory.
Between the 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 1 Corinthians 13:13, which reads: “And now abide Faith, Hope, Love, These Three; but the greatest of these is Love.”