The annual celebration of Martin Luther Kings leadership and ideals helps reminds us how far we have come as a nation in dealing with profound issues of civil rights and social justiceand how far we still have to go. Providing all people with equal opportunities to pursue their dreams and fulfill their potential remains an urgent hope and inspiring goal.

Few have been more steadfast in promoting the gospel of love and redemption than Coretta Scott King. Since Dr. Kings murder in 1968, his remarkable widow has energetically sustained her husbands work, challenging the nation and the world to see that his spirit never dies.

Coretta Scott was born in 1927 near Marion, Alabama. Raised on a cotton farm, she and her two siblings walked five miles each day to attend the one-room all-black Crossroads School.

Coretta was a bright, conscientious student who finished at the top of her high school class, earning a scholarship to Antioch College in Ohio, where she majored in music and volunteered on behalf of various community projects. An inscription on a statue at Antioch College shaped her outlook then and since: Be ashamed to die until youve won some victory for humanity.

After graduating from Antioch in 1951, Coretta Scott decided to become a professional singer and enrolled in Bostons New England Conservatory of Music. There she met Martin Luther King, Jr., a short, stocky doctoral student at Boston University remarkable for his earnest demeanor. He displayed an air of excited gravity and precocious maturity. After their first date, King told Coretta that the four things I look for in a wife are character, intelligence, personality, and beauty. You have them all. They married in 1953.

The following year, after Coretta graduated from the conservatory, they moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. King began his work as a minister. As Dr. King assumed leadership of the bus boycott and the larger civil rights movement, Coretta took responsibility for raising their four children. It was not easy. In 1956, white supremacists bombed the Kings home in Montgomery, and Coretta and her first child narrowly escaped injury.

By the late 1950s, the responsibilities of national leadership required Dr. King to spend more and more time traveling, and Coretta grew accustomed to his long absences. She also was forced to accommodate his complex psyche. Dr. King was an extraordinary leader with deep religious convictions, but he was no saint; he was a many-faceted personality, spurred by the highest of ideals, yet tormented by relentless insecurities, character flaws, and wayward behavior. I am a troubled soul, he confessed on more than one occasion.

Where Dr. King roiled with psychological turbulence, Coretta Scott King radiated a majestic poise. She became a full partner in her husbands work, walking beside him in marches, traveling abroad with him, giving speeches on his behalf, and adjusting to his long absences. She was always more of an activist than Martin, says Andrew Young, one of Dr. Kings lieutenants. Although people didnt realize it, the action part was always difficult for him. He wanted to preach and reason things out. Coretta wanted to march.

When Dr. King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in April 1968, Coretta immediately resolved to continue his work and promote his ideals. Just four days after the shooting she led a march of fifty thousand people through the streets of Memphis, and later that year she took his place in the Poor Peoples March to Washington.

In 1969 she announced the creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change near his birthplace in Atlanta. Later she spearheaded the efforts to have her husbands birthday, January 15, honored as a national holiday. She was at President Ronald Reagans side when he signed the bill creating the King holiday in 1983. She has also helped create or lead many more organizations, including the Full Employment Action Council, the Black Leadership Forum, the National Black Coalition for Voter Participation, and the Black Leadership Roundtable.

Now in her mid-seventies, Coretta Scott King continues to be an eloquent crusader for social justice and nonviolent change. During a life that has experienced tragedy, travail, and trauma, she has been remarkable for her dignity and magnanimity.

Like her fallen husband, she has become an iconic symbol of the civil rights movement. Yet Coretta Scott King deserves to be remembered as the remarkable person she is and not be embalmed in myth. She has achieved and overcome so much, yet in the process has nourished the grace to forgive and the strength to love.

I am often identified as the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., she recently noted. Sometimes I am also identified as a civil rights leader or a human rights activist. While these designations are factually correct, I would also like to be thought of as a complex, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human being with a rich storehouse of experiences, much like everyone else yet unique in my own way . . . much like everyone else.