Service held for King

LITHONIA, Ga. – At a politically tinged funeral service that ran from noon until sundown Tuesday, a crowd that joined presidents with paupers, elderly activists, thankful youths and others bade both a mournful and a joyous goodbye to the first lady of the civil rights movement, Coretta Scott King.

More than 10,000 mourners flocked to the New Missionary Baptist Church, in the outskirts of Atlanta. Thousands of people who hoped to attend the funeral for the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were turned away, and instead watched the proceedings on giant television monitors set up at a converted gym on the sprawling church campus.

The six-hour service for King, 78, who died Jan. 30 after battling ovarian cancer and the effects of a stroke, drew four U.S. presidents (the Bushes, Clinton and Carter), dozens of members of Congress and a host of entertainers.

“Coretta Scott King not only secured her husband’s legacy, she built her own,” President Bush said in one of the shorter speeches. “Having loved a leader, she became a leader, and when she spoke, Americans listened closely.”

The funeral took on political overtones, as several speakers alluded to the war in Iraq, domestic wiretapping or the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, whose rhyming oratory stirred the crowd to several standing ovations, appeared to aim pointed criticism at Bush, who seemed to shift uncomfortably as he sat behind and to the right of the podium.

“We know there were no weapons of mass destruction over there,” said Lowery, who with Rev. King co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of mass distraction right here” that have diverted the nation’s will and resources from addressing social problems.

Many of those at the church credited Coretta Scott King with having maintained the momentum of the civil rights movement after her husband’s 1968 assassination.