ATLANTA, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush and three former U.S. presidents Tuesday remembered Coretta Scott King as the first lady of the civil rights movement.
Some 10,000 mourners filled the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithona, Ga., outside Atlanta for King's funeral. King's daughter, Bernice, is a minister at the suburban church.
The 78-year-old widow of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. died Jan. 30 at an alternative medicine clinic in Mexico, where she had sought treatment for ovarian cancer.
"As a great movement of history took shape, her dignity was a daily rebuke to the pettiness and cruelty of segregation," Bush said praising Coretta King's courage and dignity. "Rarely has so much been asked of a pastor's wife, and rarely has so much been taken away."
Former presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter gave eulogies and Clinton and Carter called on Americans to live up to the standards of King and his wife.
"I have two sets of memories. I have the memories of our personal contacts which were many and interesting when I was president and afterward," said Clinton who was aboard Air Force One with the Bushes and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.
"And then of course I have the memories of her when I was a very young man and Doctor King was living and then as she immediately made a decision to carry on his legacy and that work after he was killed."
