Coretta Scott King - Later Life

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:

    The secret of a long life is knowing when it’s time to go.
    Michele Shocked (b. 1962)

    Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)