Coretta Scott King was the steadfast and determined widow of Martin Luther King Jr, in whose honour she founded The King Centre in the basement of her Atlanta home shortly after his assassination.

The foundation aimed to advance Martin Luther King’s legacy of non-violent social change, and today it is a vast, sprawling complex, which includes an exhibition hall, King’s crypt, an Institute for Afro-American studies, a library containing King’s papers and a museum.

Scott King also led the campaign to have the third Monday of every January established as a public holiday in the US in remembrance of Martin Luther King’s birthday. The day was observed for the first time in 1986.

Her activities ranged far and wide, and she became one of the most influential black spokeswomen in the world, travelling extensively to speak on social justice, black emancipation, poverty, education, Aids, African debt and women’s rights. She met Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama, and was present when Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994.

It was said that she was one of the few women with a direct phone line with the US President — although her vocal opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, condemnation of capital punishment and her support of gay marriage sat uneasily with the American right in her last years.

However, her status a selfless crusader for civil rights was not without a contentious side.

It was alleged that she exploited her name for money and that she ran the King Centre as a family business — accusations which featured in the press in 1995 after the National Parks Service announced plans to build a visitor centre across the road from her centre.

She claimed she had not been consulted about the plan and that it would siphon off revenues and make the King Centre irrelevant.

Local authority representatives suggested that ideological considerations had been replaced by mercenary concerns and Scott King’s desire to have complete control over her domain in Atlanta and the King legacy.

Certainly she was a formidable and direct woman, known for her cool, regal reserve. Her hold over the copyright of Martin Luther’s work was stringent: those who used the "I have a dream speech" without the proper permission invariably faced legal proceedings.

Coretta Scott was born in Heiberger, near Marion, Alabama, where she and her brother and sister lived on their parents’ farm.

During the Depression the children were forced to pick cotton for extra money, but her father was a resourceful businessman and managed to build up a middle-class homestead for his family. He was the first black in the district to own a truck, which put him in competition with whites in the lumber-hauling business.

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