Coretta Scott King — dead at 78

Flags at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change — which she founded in her husband’s honour — were lowered to half-staff yesterday morning.

"We appreciate the prayers and condolences from people across the country," the King family said in a statement. The family said she died during the night. She had suffered a serious stroke and heart attack in 2005.

"It’s a bleak morning for me and for many people and yet it’s a great morning because we have a chance to look at her and see what she did and who she was," poet Maya Angelou said on ABC’s Good Morning America.

King died at Santa Monica Hospital, a holistic health centre in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, 16 miles south of San Diego, said her sister Edythe Scott Bagley of Cheyney, Pennsylvania. She had gone to California to rest and be with family, according to Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who broke the news on NBC’s Today show.

President George W. Bush, in a statement, said he and his wife Laura, were fortunate to have known King. "Mrs King was a remarkable and courageous woman and a great civil rights leader," the president said.

King was a supportive lieutenant to her husband during the most tumultuous days of the American civil rights movement, and after his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, she kept his dream alive while also raising their four children.

"I’m more determined than ever that my husband’s dream will become a reality," King said soon after his slaying. She goaded and pulled for more than a decade to have her husband’s birthday observed as a national holiday, first celebrated in 1986.