ATLANTA, Jan 31: 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.

Andrew Young, a former US 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 Jan. 14 at a dinner marking the Martin Luther King Jr., holiday.

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.”

At the White House, Dan Bartlett, counsellor 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 called King “a driving force, not just for the civil rights movement, but for the great march toward progress.”—Reuters