King’s widow rests in Atlanta hospital

By Paul Simao

ATLANTA (Reuters) – Coretta Scott King, the widow of slain
civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., remained in fair
condition in an Atlanta hospital on Wednesday, one day after
being admitted with an undisclosed illness, hospital officials
said.

King, 78, who suffers from a heart condition, was taken to
Piedmont Hospital on Tuesday and placed under observation.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on Wednesday that
the civil rights matriarch had suffered a stroke. King’s family
and hospital staff, however, refused to discuss the reason for
her hospitalization.

“Please continue to keep her and us in your thoughts and
prayers as she moves toward a speedy and complete recovery,”
Martin Luther King III, one of King’s sons, said in a statement
on behalf of the family.

Although she has curtailed her public appearances in recent
months, Coretta Scott 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 moved to the forefront of the movement after her
husband was murdered on a Memphis, Tennessee, motel balcony by
a sniper on April 4, 1968. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was
killed while supporting striking sanitation workers.

His widow quickly created 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, urging it to
be more tolerant of gays. She also has criticized the U.S.
involvement in Iraq.