February 20, 2006

President George W. Bush, joined by former Presidents Bush, Carter and Clinton, spoke at the February 6 memorial service in Lithonia (GA) for Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King. Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin also delivered a eulogy at the service. Following are her remarks.

To Yolanda, Martin, Dexter and Bernice, Mrs. Christine Farris and the entire King family, President Bush, Distinguished guests and, Ladies and gentlemen. Good Afternoon.

My presence here today is a result of many things and many people not the least of which are my mother, my family and my political mentors, Andrew Young and the late Maynard Jackson. However my presence here today as Mayor of Atlanta is equally a living witness and testimony to the voices of a freedom choir, a chorus made up of Septima Clark, Alberta King, Bernice Scott, Daisy Bates and Ella Baker, Jean Young and Mary McLeod Bethune, Constance Motley and Margie Pitts Hames, Bertha Mae Carter and Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Ethel Mae Brayboy, Ethel Mae Mathews, Dorothy Bolton, Fannie Lou Hamer, And the newest member, Coretta Scott King. I am here because they lived and they struggled.

As most of you know Mrs. King was a trained and gifted vocalist and she joins the freedom choir, this constellation of guardian angels equipped with her own songs.

I and we should be grateful that Coretta King’s extraordinary voice never trembled in the face of intimidation, evil or violent attacks. Her voice was marked by an elocution that was full of clarity on the causes of racism, the senselessness of war, and the solutions to poverty. Her resonance had international range from Sunset Avenue in Atlanta to the rice paddies of Saigon, from the tin roof huts in Soweto to bomb shelters in Bagdad, from the concert halls of Boston to the camps in Darfur.

She sang for liberation. She sang for those who had no earthly reason to sing.

Mrs. King’s commitment to struggle for freedom forced her to occasionally sing accapella and too often solo.

Widowed with four children to raise her commitment demanded that she sing louder and more often. But mother Coretta made certain homework was checked, lunches were packed and her children were safe.

Four days after her husband was assassinated with her children in tow she traveled to Memphis. She addressed those in attendance and the nation describing within her a propelling moral force and urge to move forward. In her words she “was impelled to come…. Concerned not only about the Negro poor, but the poor all over the nation and all over the world.”

The last stanza and the highest note of Coretta King’s freedom song remains to be sung. She’s gathered us here today to lift our voices in songs of freedom, equality, social and economic justice for our own sake and for the sake of children the world over.

Who among us will join the freedom choir? Who among us will sing Coretta’s song with courage and conviction to smother the war cries of hatred, Economic exploitation, poverty and political disenfranchisement?

For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for me.