• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

King widow admitted to Atlanta hospital

Posted on: Tuesday, 16 August 2005, 13:37 CDT

By Paul Simao

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Coretta Scott King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., has been admitted to an Atlanta hospital with an undisclosed condition, a hospital official said on Tuesday.

"She is here and is resting comfortably," said Diana Lewis, a spokeswoman for Piedmont Hospital. Lewis would not give any details on why King, 78, was brought to the hospital or when she had been admitted.

King was briefly hospitalized at the same hospital earlier this year with a heart problem. At that time, her family said her condition was not serious.

Although she has curtailed her public appearances in recent months, King remains an icon in the black community for the role she played in the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

She continued to fight for equality after her husband was murdered on a Memphis motel balcony by a sniper's bullet on April 4, 1968. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was killed while supporting striking sanitation workers.

His widow moved quickly to create a memorial in the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, with archives containing more than 2,000 King speeches, a complex built around the King crypt and an eternal flame.

She also campaigned successfully for a federal holiday celebrating his birthday, conducted annual "King Week" observances, restaged the 1963 march on Washington during which King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, and made appearances promoting his philosophy of nonviolence.

In 1998, she broke 30 years of silence on the subject of her husband's assassination, saying she did not believe James Earl Ray, the man sentenced to 99 years in prison for King's slaying, acted alone.

King said she believed the assassination was the work of a high-level government conspiracy, as Ray contended, and pushed for the creation of a federal "truth" commission to investigate the matter.

Ray died in prison in 1998 at age 70.

In recent years, King has been active in the struggle to control the spread of AIDS in the black community.

Source: REUTERS

More News in this Category