Coretta Scott King: 1927-2006 Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., has died at age 79, ABC News reports. She was hospitalized last August after a stroke had left her weak and unable to walk.
We all know about her slain husband's accomplishments, but how much do we really know about the woman who stood beside him, and then carried on his legacy after his death in 1968? Here's a bit of her biography, from the ABC News report.
Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, on a farm in Heiberger, Ala. Though the family owned the land, it was often a hardscrabble life. The young Coretta, her sister, Edythe, and brother, Obie, all had to pick cotton during the Depression to help the family make ends meet.
The Scott family was resourceful and blazed trails for blacks in its small corner of the world. Her father, Obediah, was the first black person in the area to own a truck, and he eventually opened a country store. Her mother, Bernice, hired a bus to drive all the black children to and from Lincoln High School -- nine miles from Heiberger.
An intelligent and hard-working student, Scott King played trumpet and piano, and graduated from Lincoln High at the top of her class in 1945. She followed her older sister to Antioch College in Ohio, where Edythe had been the first full-time black student to live on campus.
At Antioch, Scott King majored in music and education. When she graduated, she decided she wanted to pursue music instead of teaching. She received a scholarship to study violin and voice at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met her future husband, Martin Luther King Jr., who was studying theology at Boston University.
The Kings were married in 1953, and the following year, they moved to Montgomery, Ala., where King began his ministry.