Later Life
Every year after the assassination of her husband in 1968, Coretta attended a commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to mark his birthday on January 15. She fought for years to make it a national holiday. Murray M. Silver, an Atlanta attorney, made the appeal at the services on January 14, 1979. Coretta Scott King later confirmed that it was the "...best, most productive appeal ever..." Coretta Scott King was finally successful in this in 1986, when Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was made a federal holiday.
Coretta Scott King attended the state funeral of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1973, as a very close friend of the former president.
In 1979 and 1980 Dr. Noel Erskine and Mrs. King co-taught a class on "The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr." at the Candler School of Theology (Emory University).
When President Ronald Reagan signed legislation establishing Martin Luther King Day, she was at the event.
She became vegan in the last 10 years of her life.
Read more about this topic: Coretta Scott King
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.
And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
“It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)