ATLANTA - Coretta Scott King, who surged to the front of the fight for racial equality in America after her husband Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, died at age 78, friends and family said on Tuesday.

"Her daughter was with her at the time she passed, probably about 1 to 1:15 this morning," said Bishop Eddie Long of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia, the pastor of King's youngest child Bernice.

Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., walks a picket line with others to protest apartheid in South Africa, in this Nov. 29, 1984 file photo, at the South African Embassy in Washington. King, who turned a life shattered by her husband's assassination into one devoted to enshrining his legacy of human rights and equality, has died, former mayor Andrew Young told NBC Tuesday, morning, Jan. 31, 2006. She was 78. (AP Photo/Charles Tasnadi, File)

Andrew Young, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a close friend of the King family, told reporters she died in California.

King suffered a debilitating stroke and heart attack in August. She was last seen in public on January 14 at a dinner marking the Martin Luther King Jr., holiday, where she received a standing ovation from the 1,500 people in the crowd.

Her steely determination, grace and class won her millions of admirers inside and outside the civil rights movement.

Rep. John Lewis, a Democratic congressman from Georgia and civil rights leader, said her death was "a very sad hour."

"Long before she met and married Dr. King, she was an activist for peace and civil rights and for civil liberties," he told CNN.

At the White House, Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, told Fox television: "President Bush and first lady Laura Bush were always heartened by their meetings with Mrs. King. ... President and Mrs. Bush are deeply saddened by today's news."

Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, called King "a driving force, not just for the civil rights movement, but for the great march toward progress."

Coretta Scott King played a back-up role in the civil rights movement until her husband was assassinated on a Memphis motel balcony on April 4, 1968.

Mrs. King, who was in Atlanta at the time, learned of the murder in a telephone call from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a call she later wrote, "I seemed subconsciously to have been waiting for all of our lives."

As she recalled in her autobiography "My Life With Martin Luther King Jr.," she felt she had to step fully into the civil rights movement.

She created a memorial and a forum in the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. The center has archives containing more than 2,000 King speeches and is built around the King crypt and its eternal flame.

Childhood Home Torched

Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, near Marion, Alabama. Spending much of her early years on a farm, she saw little prejudice until she and her sister were sent into town to board with a family while attending Lincoln High School, a black school in the segregated South.

"It was awful," she said of living in Marion. "Every Saturday we would hear about some black man getting beat up, and nothing was done about it."

Her father had built up a small trucking business but his success began to irritate poor whites, she said, and, after considerable harassment someone burned down the Scott home on Thanksgiving night 1942.

"I guess I was being prepared for my role when I was growing up, because when we were young children my father's life was in danger," Mrs. King once told Reuters. "We were afraid he was going to be killed.

"A white man threatened him, and he never ran. He was fearless," she said.

Church and music had always been a major part in young Coretta Scott's life, and after graduating in 1951 from majority white Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

King, who was studying for his doctorate in theology at Boston University, had told a mutual friend he was looking for a wife. The friend gave him Coretta Scott's phone number, but when he came calling she was not impressed.

"I saw this green car coming up the street and this short man. He leaned over to open the door, and when I got in the car I saw this very young looking man. I thought, 'Oh my God, I expected to see a man but this is a boy.'"

When he began to speak, however, she changed her mind.

She never had any doubt that King was going to battle the status quo. "Even at the time we were courting," she said, "Martin was deeply concerned -- and indignant -- with the plight of the Negro in the United States."

They were married at her parents' home on June 18, 1953 and had four children: Yolanda Denise, born in 1955, Martin Luther, III, born in 1957, Dexter Scott, born in 1961, and Bernice Albertine, born in 1963.

They moved in 1956 to Montgomery, Alabama, where the 26-year-old minister became active in civil rights, involving himself in the Montgomery bus boycott.

Bishop Long said she "understood what she was getting into" when she married Martin Luther King.

"She said a statement that burned in the heart of my wife and myself, she said when she married Martin, she did not marry a man, she married a vision," he said.

© 2006 Reuters

###