MSNBC staff and news service reports
Updated: 2:18 p.m. ET Feb. 7, 2006
LITHONIA, Ga. - Some 10,000 mourners, among them four U.S. presidents, lawmakers and celebrities paid tribute to Coretta Scott King on Tuesday, saying goodbye to the "first lady of the civil rights movement."
The crowd stood as King’s four children walked into New Birth Missionary Baptist Church with Bush and former presidents Clinton, Bush and Carter.
Mass. Sen. Edward Kennedy, praised King as "a remarkable combination of power and peacefulness" in a period of bitter racial conflict. "In the face of her constant courage, her unshakable faith, her inner strength, and quiet grace, even Jim Crow had to yield," he said, to growing applause.
He praised her for opposing all forms of injustice, including South African apartheid, and like speakers before him, he urged mourners to look ahead.
"The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die," said Kennedy.
Earlier, President Bush called Coretta King “one of the most admired Americans of our time.”
“Her journey was long and only briefly with a hand to hold, but now she leans on everlasting arms. In all her years, Coretta Scott King proved that a person of conviction and strength could also be a beautiful soul,” he said.
Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin said King spoke out, not just against racism, but against “the senselessness of war and the solutions for poverty.”
“She sang for liberation, she sang for those who had no earthly reason to sing a song,” with a voice that was heard “from the tintop roofs of Soweto to the bomb shelters of Baghdad,” Franklin said.
The last stanza
“The last stanza and highest note of Coretta King’s freedom song remains to be sung,” the mayor said. “She’s gathered us here today from all walks of life and all persuasions to lift our voices in a song of freedom, equality, social and economic justice, not just for our own sake but for the sake of the children the world over.”
King, who carried on her husband’s dream of equality for nearly 40 years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, died Jan. 30 at the age of 78 after battling ovarian cancer and the effects of a stroke.
The four presidents, poet Maya Angelou and the Kings’ children were among at least 39 people scheduled to speak during the funeral. Stevie Wonder, Michael Bolton, and Bebe and Cece Winans were slated to perform.
Delivering the eulogy fell to Kings’ youngest child, Bernice, a minister at the megachurch. She was 5 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.
Outside the suburban church Tuesday morning, the lines to get into the funeral and to attend the final viewing of King’s body started forming before 3 a.m.
“There’s one word to describe going to go see Coretta — historic. It’s good to finally see her at peace,” said Robert Jackson, a 34-year-old financial consultant from Atlanta whose 10-year-old daughter, Ebony, persuaded him to take her to the church.
Historic moment
More than 160,000 mourners have waited in long lines to pay their respects at public viewings since King’s body was returned to Georgia — on Monday at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where her husband preached in the 1960s, at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church on Tuesday morning, and during the weekend at the Georgia Capitol, where King became the first woman and the first black person to lie in honor there.
“She made many great sacrifices,” said Sean Washington, 38, who drove from Tampa, Fla., with his wife and children from a disability center, to attend the King’s funeral. “To be in her presence once more is something that I would definitely cherish, no matter what.”
The funeral followed a day of tributes at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Gladys Knight performed and television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, former Atlanta mayor and King lieutenant Andrew Young and others shared their memories of King.
'She embodied royalty'
“For me, she embodied royalty. She was the queen. ... You knew she was a force,” Winfrey told an audience of 1,700 at the 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 or 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, King’s body will be 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 First Corinthians 13:13, which reads: “And now abide Faith, Hope, Love, These Three; but the greatest of these is Love.”
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Posted By: Candice Johnson
Tuesday, February 7th 2006 at 2:22PM
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