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:
“He was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... it is a rather curious thing to have to divide one’s life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its hidden compartment to be taken out again when one’s official duties are at an end.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)