Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King was most famously the widow of slain civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., but she leaves her own legacy of courage, dignity and perseverance.

Her death Monday night followed a stroke and heart attack she suffered in August. Earlier in the day, the Smithsonian Institution made an announcement unconnected to her death but intimately bound to her life. A long-proposed and -debated National Museum of African-American History and Culture will be built on a prized site on the Mall near the Washington Monument. Mrs. King will stride into the museum's sweeping narrative shoulder to shoulder with her husband, the same way they faced angry mobs early in the civil-rights movement.

Her life was filled with all the triumph and heartbreak of a public figure in her own right, the secrets of a marriage to a man both loathed and revered, and as a protective mother of four children. Mrs. King gave up her husband, risked her own life and surrendered her privacy for a cause that was bigger than a young preacher and a decorous and cultured minister's wife.

She later dedicated herself to nurturing the historical and institutional memory of Dr. King. The completion of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta was an achievement, but the day-to-day operations of the center have struggled. Mrs. Scott had to mediate between two competing visions divided over the center's social mission and the economic potential of marketing a civil-rights brand.

The most appropriate rescue for one piece of the combined King legacy may be for the National Park Service to buy and assume responsibility for the King center Mrs. King worked so hard to build.

Coretta Scott King is a fitting symbol of the historic movement for human dignity she helped to lead.