The death of an Icon

Coretta Scott King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., died Monday night at age 78. She had dedicated her life to her late husband's legacy and to bringing civil rights to all Americans.

"This is a very sad hour," U.S. Rep. John Lewis, the Democrat from Georgia, told CNN on Tuesday. "She was the glue. Long before she met and married Martin Luther King Jr. she was an activist," he said.

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a family friend, described her as a "matriarch of the movement, a patriot of all that America stands for."

Born in Marion, Alabama, on April 27, 1927, Coretta Scott attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, where she met Martin Luther King Jr., a theology student. They married on June 18, 1953, in her hometown of Marion.

As Rev. King began his civil rights work in Montgomery, Alabama, Coretta Scott King worked closely with him, organizing marches and sit-ins at segregated restaurants while raising their four children.

The family endured the beating, stabbing and jailing of the civil rights leader, and their house was bombed.

After an assassin's bullet killed her husband in Memphis in 1968, Coretta Scott King turned her grief into the nurturing of her husband's legacy.

She spoke out on behalf of racial and economic justice, women's and children's rights, gay and lesbian dignity, religious freedom, the needs of the poor and homeless, full-employment, health care, educational opportunities, nuclear disarmament and ecological sanity.

A huge loss for America.

And consider this: isn't it ironic that her will to fight gave up right after outspoken-anti-civil-rights Judge Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination became all but guaranteed?