Coretta Scott King’s death is not the end of a dream, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper said Monday at a memorial service for the first lady of civil rights, who will be buried in Atlanta today.
Hickenlooper joined about 200 people who gathered to remember King at the New Hope Baptist Church.
“Part of her greatness,” Hickenlooper said, “… was she dealt with great tribulation and trials and kept her faith and kept those around her moving forward.”
King and her husband, slain civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., “brought us all closer to the promised land on Earth,” the mayor said. They taught that however one is treated, violence is not the answer, Hickenlooper said.
“She was in every way someone that this country cherished,” he said.
The Rev. Acen Phillips suggested that Martin Luther King would not be remembered the way he is today if it weren’t for his widow.
She campaigned tirelessly for a day to be named in his memory. In 1983, Congress passed a bill proclaiming an annual holiday. It was first celebrated in 1986.
“If God’s going to send you a blessing, he is going to wrap it in a burden,” Phillips said. “If you want the blessing, you first have to accept the burden. Nobody knew how to do that better than Coretta.”
City Councilwoman Elbra Wedgeworth said, “It is the quality, not the longevity, of one’s life that is important. The quality of Mrs. King’s life was a rich one.”
“Whenever we want to think of Mrs. King, I say, ‘Look at the sunset and she will be there …”‘
Former Denver first lady Wilma Webb, in a statement read by the Rev. Sandra Sullivan, said King’s life “had depth, height and width. … She made a positive difference in the improvement of people.”
The living are the beneficiaries of what the Kings worked for.
“We thank Mrs. King for her life’s work. It is now up to each one of us to carry on her work.”
The Rev. Paul Burleson compared King to other great black women of the past, including Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.
“God, we thank you for sending Mrs. Coretta Scott King our way,” said Burleson.
She was a woman of unwavering faith, miraculous strength, exemplary courage and extraordinary commitment, said the Rev. Regina Groff.
King was a woman who, in her death, challenges each generation to “take up the torch of productive leadership.”
King was a woman who worked tirelessly to keep alive “the dream” for which her husband fought, lived and died, Groff said.
She “sang her own song and marched on, prayed on, lived on and praised on, through the storm and through the rain, through the pain and through the scandals …,” Groff said.
King, she said, was a woman she respected and admired and a woman “who is my model.”
