amazing grace.......

Seventy-eight years ago, a baby girl was born in Heilberger, Alabama. She would learn to pick cotton, as well as endure the hardships of poverty during her young life. She encountered her first sense of the world when she attended a private missionary school and studied piano and voice lessons. Having college educated teachers, she resolved to flee the segregated constraints of rural Alabama.

When she was old enough, she moved to Boston to study music at The New England Conservatory of Music. It was there that she met her future husband, a minister from Atlanta, who told her on their first date, "The four things that I look for in a wife are character, personality, intelligence and beauty. And you have them all". Within a year they were married, and a remarkable partnership was formed. What was supposed to be a quiet life of a Ministers wife, turned into a movement that changed history.

On April 4, 1968, her husband was a target of an assisignation, which left him fatally wounded.
Alone, with four small children to raise, she never stopped carrying the torch of freedom for all men, with her tireless work and infinite spiritual depth. She was accused as being chilly and aloof by others in the movement, and faced many controversies over the years. But it was she who came to personify the ideals of her husband. She was well liked and well respected by many people, and many were inspired by her presence alone.

Today, the city of Atlanta lays to rest the mortal remains of Coretta Scott King.

She will be remembered as a woman of amazing grace, even under the harshest of circumstances. In the past few years, The King Center in Atlanta has endured a lot of criticism due to it's lack of family cohesiveness and scandals. It didn't start out that way.
Mrs. King was instrumental in making it a center that enshrined the thoughts and beliefs of her husbands preachings. She became an international symbol of the civil rights revolution of the 1960's, and an advocate for social change till the end of her life; and she willingly lobbied political issues that ranged from womans rights to apartheid in South Africa. Over the past years, she turned the affairs of the center over to her children, and much has been said about the "legacy", but many people feel that nothing has been done to further it, after her children took over.
Many wonder how it will all be held together now that Mrs. King belongs to the ages.
Her children have some very big shoes to fill, but amid all the scandals, they have a bigger mountain to move first.

Mrs. King may have been a mere woman, but she embodied the character of compassion. Even after James Earl Ray was convicted of murdering her husband in 1968, she baffled her allies by contending that Ray did not commit the crime. She stood strong and held the head of a dignified person, a character trait of her inner beliefs. She was very beautiful inside and out.

In her last years, she suffered a stroke, and was left without much of a voice to speak with. She also suffered from ovarian cancer, for which there is no cure. Because she believed in holistic measures as a way of healing, her daughter took her to Baja California, Mexico to seek treatment. Before she could even receive her first treatment, she died in her sleep. Perhaps her tired body just gave out, and now it was time to join her husband. What a sweet way to see her go.

They have reserved her grave on a pleasant spot under some shade trees at the King Center. When her tomb is finished, they will move her body to lay beside that of her husband. Perhaps she wasn't the civil rights leader in the truest sense, but she became the icon and first lady of civil rights after her husband died. She represented a woman of peace, racial justice, womans rights and fairness.

There is no doubt that she escaped the rural trappings of Heilberger, Alabama, and will go down in history books as a mover and shaker of our time.
Rest in peace, Mrs. King.... your work will long be appreciated.