[Mb-civic] Coretta Scott King's Legacy Celebrated in Final Farewell - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Coretta Scott King's Legacy Celebrated in Final Farewell

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 8, 2006; A01

LITHONIA, Ga., Feb. 7 -- Coretta Scott King was bid a final farewell 
Tuesday in a stirring church service that was equal parts funeral, 
family reunion, and national commemoration of the woman who embodied the 
soul and ideals of the modern civil rights movement.

"In all her years, Coretta Scott King showed that a person of conviction 
and strength could also be a beautiful soul," President Bush told 
mourners at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. "This kind and gentle 
woman became one of the most admired Americans of our time. She is 
rightly mourned, and she is deeply missed."

Speaker after speaker heaped praise on King, who died Jan. 30 at age 78, 
and on her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was assassinated 
in 1968, a time of racial segregation when such a gathering of powerful 
white and black politicians, as well as upwardly mobile black people 
from all walks of life, in a church that seats 10,000 -- almost half the 
size of MCI Center -- was not yet possible.

The six-hour service, held in a lavish black church in the wealthy, 
majority-black Atlanta suburb of DeKalb County, seemed to strive 
mightily to project a theme of inclusion and the setting aside of 
political differences. Among the speakers were four of the five living 
U.S. presidents; several lawmakers; the Georgia governor, who is locked 
in a pitched battle with black lawmakers over voting rights; and a 
television evangelist.

Several high-profile -- and politically charged -- black figures, such 
at the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, were not accorded 
a place onstage.

Still, political tensions occasionally burst through the veneer of 
reconciliation. At one point, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, a former head 
of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the group Martin 
Luther King Jr. helped found, made a reference to not finding weapons of 
mass destruction in Iraq. The well-heeled, mostly black crowd erupted in 
a standing ovation.

In his speech, former president George H.W. Bush noted that Lowery's 
address was all in rhyme. "Maya Angelou has nothing to worry about," he 
said, looking at Lowery. "Don't quit your day job."

Former president Bill Clinton, whose popularity among black people has 
not waned, was greeted like a returning hero, his remarks peppered with 
wild ovations and his one-liners greeted by raucous laughter. He 
dedicated his speech to the King children: Yolanda, Martin Luther III, 
Dexter and Bernice.

"Her children, we know they have to bear the burden of their mother and 
father's legacy," Clinton told the crowd. "We clap for that, but they 
have to go home and live it." He challenged the mourners. "You want to 
treat our friend Coretta like a role model? Then model her behavior."

The sanctuary was packed from the beginning, at noon, almost to the end, 
at 6 p.m. Many of the 10,000 attendees walked several miles along 
winding roads in the morning cold to reach the church. Many more who 
arrived too late stood behind police barricades outside.

The scene resembled any number of civil rights marches, as lines of 
black people walked up hills, in black mourning clothes and polished 
dress shoes, to say goodbye to the woman who helped open society's doors.

In the church, under the white domed ceiling ringed with brilliant 
lights sat King's copper casket, topped with a huge arrangement of 
reddish-orange roses, yellow lilies and greenery. Bishop Eddie Long, 
resplendent in white raiments, introduced the speakers who rose from 
brown leather chairs to address the mourners.

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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/07/AR2006020702187.html
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