US News
Four presidents travel to Coretta Scott King funeral
By DPA
Feb 7, 2006, 19:00 GMT

Washington - Four US presidents travelled Tuesday to Atlanta for the funeral of civil rights leader Coretta Scott King, joining a stream of notables attending the ceremony.

US President George W. Bush and former president Bill Clinton travelled together on Air Force One. In addition, former president George Bush, father of the current president, and former president Jimmy Carter were in Atlanta.

Services were held at Atlanta's largest black church, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, with a sanctuary that can hold 10,000 people. An overflow crowd was accommodated at a nearby gymnasium.

As he entered the huge church, Clinton received a huge round of applause, setting an almost festive mood for the service. Clinton is very popular with the black community, and has located his post- presidential headquarters in Manhattan's black community, Harlem.

On board Air Force One with Bush, Clinton recalled King's courage just a week after her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., was felled by an assassin's bullet in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.

'One of the most vivid things to me, although almost nobody would have mentioned it, is that less than a week after he was shot she and her children went to Memphis and led that march that he was down there to lead,' Clinton said, according to a transcript of his remarks released in Washington.

First Lady Laura Bush also attended the service.

As King's funeral got underway, Bishop Eddie L. Long greeted the crowd, saying: 'We are better because she was here.'

Long recalled that he once asked King how she handled the pressure of being married to the civil rights hero.

'She said, 'I understood when I married Martin that I did not marry just the man, I married a vision and a destiny,'' King said. 'We are celebrating the destiny and vision, and the dream is still alive.'

In broadcast remarks before the ceremony, the Reverend Jesse Jackson said Coretta Scott King had 'never stopped marching. Her legacy is secure, but there is the unfinished business' of the fight for full equality for blacks.

Reverend Al Sharpton, an African-American leader from New York, called King 'the first lady of the civil rights movement' and said the struggle must go on, especially after hurricane Katrina.

Many in the black community have charged that tens of thousands were left stranded for days in New Orleans after the storm struck because of their black skin, and President Bush took the brunt of that criticism.

'I think we cannot mourn Mrs. King and stall her movement,' Sharpton told Cable News Network (CNN). 'She taught us not to fight anger with anger, not to fight hatred with hate, but she also taught us never to sell out the cause.'

King was a national force for change and reconciliation in US politics for more than 30 years after her husband's death, and attended presidential inaugurations - including George W. Bush's disputed installation in 2001.

Bush had lost the popular vote - and received only 9 per cent of the black vote - but won a Supreme Court decision on Florida's disputed vote. Tens of thousands protested on inauguration day.

Even though she criticized Bush for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, saying 'war is a poor chisel for carving out a peaceful future,' she appeared with Bush in 2004 on the birthday visit to her husband's tomb. The visit was marred by protesters who could be heard shouting for the President to 'go home' as he laid a wreath.