ATLANTA -- Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. was memorialized Wednesday night as a man who would not hate those who killed his wife and son and a civil rights pioneer who 'is still in business -- he just moved upstairs.'
'No evil could make him hate,' said Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who called King's life 'a triumph over evil, hate and violence.'
An estimated 2,500 people packed the Morehouse College Chapel for a Wednesday evening memorial service for King, who died of a heart attack Sunday at age 84.
The body of King's Nobel Peace Prize-winning son, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., lay in state at the same chapel following his assassination in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968.
Dr. Hugh Gloster, president of Morehouse, called King 'the daddy of black America.'
'He began the struggle for civil rights long before it became safe or popular to do so,' Gloster said.
Martin Luther King III said his grandfather preached that 'people should love one another unconditionally, regardless of pain and suffering we might experience.'
'Maybe we could leave here tonight with that kind of love. That's what granddaddy was all about. I can hear granddaddy as I go to my seat and that's why I'm happy because I know he's still in business -- he just moved upstairs,' King said.
So many mourners wanted to attend King's 11 a.m. funeral Thursday at Ebenezer Baptist Church that tickets to were issued to keep the 750-seat church from overflowing.
Closed circuit television of the service was to be shown at the adjacent Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change for those who could not get inside the red brick church on Auburn Avenue where King was pastor for 44 years.
King's body will lie in state at Ebenezer Baptist until the funeral.
King will be buried in Southview Cemetery beside his wife, Alberta, whom he called 'Honeybunch.' She was killed by a crazed gunman in June 1974 while playing the organ during services at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The old soldiers of the civil rights movement, friends and political figures are expected to pay final respects to 'Daddy' King Thursday.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson and former President Jimmy Carter were both scheduled to speak at the funeral service. Vice President George Bush was to arrive before the service to lay a wreath at the younger King's crypt.
Also expected to attend were Nelson Rockefeller Jr.; comedian Flip Wilson; former California Gov. Jerry Brown; Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Ind., and Georgia Gov. Joe Frank Harris.
Although King had more than his share of tragedy in life, he refused to hate the men who killed his son and wife.
'I don't hate either one,' he said of assassin James Earl Ray and Marcus Chenault, who killed his wife. 'There is no time for that, and no reason, either. Nothing that a man does takes him lower than when he allows himself to fall so low as to hate anyone.'
King's youngest son, the Rev. A.D. King of Atlanta drowned in his swimming pool in July 1969. In July 1976, his grandaughter, Esther Darlene King, suffered a fatal heart aotack while jogging.
King was a pioneer in the civil rights movement that his son championed in the 1950s and 1960s.
The elder King was active in the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP in the 1930s and led several hundred blacks in a voting rights march on the Atlanta City Hall in 1936.
He was pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church from 1931 to 1975. During his ministry the church became a shrine of the civil rights movement and Atlanta's most famous church.
