Coretta Scott King: Coretta Scott King, who has died in her sleep at the age of 78, was the wife of Dr Martin Luther King jnr, the most influential civil rights leader in America, whose assassination in 1968 set off rioting across the United States.
After her husband's death, she presided over the King Centre in Atlanta, an institution devoted to preserving his memory and developing the causes in which he believed.
Perhaps Coretta's greatest success was in establishing Martin Luther King Day, commemorating her husband's birthday on January 15th as a US national holiday. The battle to establish it was ugly, with conservatives, nearly 20 years after the assassination, bring- ing up FBI evidence of King's infidelities, as well as allegations of his links to communists.
Coretta continued to stand up with courage and ferocity for her husband's values. In 1985 she and three of her children were arrested during a demonstration at the South African embassy in Washington.
She also responded angrily when a group of black clergymen used King's name and picture in a campaign against gay rights, insisting that if he were alive he would have denounced prejudice against gay people as he had denounced racial discrimination.
Coretta Scott was born into poverty in Heiberger, Alabama. Her father was a lumber carrier and, in the depression that began when she was two years old, life was hard for black families in the deep south.
She was a clever and highly motivated girl, however, and graduated as valedictorian (top student) at nearby Antioch high school, winning a scholarship to the small but highly regarded Antioch liberal arts college in Ohio, where she studied music and education.
In 1951 she won a scholarship to the New England conservatory of music in Boston, and it was while studying voice and violin there that she met her future husband, then reading theology at Boston University. In 1953, Coretta and Martin were married.
The black south was on the eve of dramatic change. School systems were all segregated, with states spending substantially less money on each African-American pupil than on whites. Social and residential segregation remained virtually absolute.
In 1954, however, the US Supreme Court, in the case of Brown v the school board of Topeka, Kansas, found that separate schools could not be considered equal, thus overturning more than 60 years of southern custom. But change was slow in following. A year later, the court ordered states to comply "with all deliberate speed", but southern white politicians resisted desegregation.
Local police forces used violence as well as legal penalties to enforce what was trumpeted as being the "southern way of life".
King took up the post of pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, a black church literally in the shadow of the state capitol building.
In 1955 Montgomery's African-Americans, led by Rosa Parks (obituary, October 26th, 2005) and the veteran ED Nixon, organised a boycott of the city's buses after Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Racial tension was high and the Kings' house was fire-bombed.
In 1962, King began a series of what were, in effect, non-violent raids on one southern town after another: Albany, Georgia; St Augustine, Florida, and - climactically - Birmingham, the hard steel town in Alabama.
Coretta had thus far been absorbed in bringing up her four children: Yolanda, Martin Luther III, Dexter and Bernice. She also spoke frequently at church gatherings and used her musical ability to organise a series of freedom concerts to raise money for her husband's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In 1959 she travelled with him to India to meet fellow disciples of Mahatma Gandhi and acquire a deeper knowledge of the philosophy of non-violent resistance.
The years of the civil rights revolution, however, were a difficult time for Coretta and her marriage. Martin was constantly on the road, operating under intense stress. He was subjected to political pressure, obliged to take decisions where either option might be dangerous to his cause and reputation, and threatened with arrest or lethal violence.
He handled this stress with a blend of prayer, fairly heavy drinking with ministers on his staff, and casual affairs with young women.
He was also becoming a national and international figure. The climax of the first southern phase of his career came in 1963 when he was arrested in Alabama and wrote his classic Letter from Birmingham Jail.
He finally succeeded in persuading President Kennedy and his brother Robert, then US attorney general, to come out openly in favour of civil rights legislation. That summer he gave his famous "I have a dream" speech to more than a quarter of a million people - black and white - in Washington. The following year Coretta went with her husband to Oslo to receive the Nobel peace prize.
The coming years, however, were in some ways even harder than the time of the struggle in the south, and put additional pressures on Coretta and her marriage. Martin Luther King broadened his movement to the northern US states, as he sought to make poverty part of the national agenda. Then, in April 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was trying to negotiate a peaceful solution to a dustmen's strike, King was shot dead.
Coretta devoted the rest of her life to keeping alive the flame her husband had lit.
She was the founding president, chair and chief executive of the Martin Luther King jnr centre for non-violent social change, which she saw as a living memorial to her husband and his dream of the "beloved community".
As early as June 19th, 1968, she made a speech on Solidarity Day calling for a "solid block of women power" to fight racism, poverty and war. The following year she had published My Life with Martin Luther King Jr, a detailed, if not particularly intimate, account of their marriage. She wrote two other books.
In 1974 she formed a coalition of more than 100 church, labour, business and women's organisations to campaign for full employment. In 1981 the King Centre opened and Coretta continued to be active in a wide range of causes both in the US and abroad. From the 1980s, she campaigned against the death penalty, especially for juveniles.
She was showered with honours of every kind, including more than 40 honorary doctorates. She was the first woman to give the class day address at Harvard and to preach at St Paul's cathedral. Last year she suffered a stroke and a heart attack. She is survived by her four children.
Coretta Scott King, born April 27th, 1927; died January 31st, 2006.