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the funeral director to open the casket so that her children could see their father’s body. Although the assassin’s bullet had caused extensive damage to her husband’s neck and jaw, as she looked at him laid out in the white-satin-lined casket, Coretta thought that his face appeared “so young and smooth and unworried,” and the wound was barely visible. She hoped that seeing their father in his coffin would help the children—five-year-old Bernice (known as Bunny) in particular—understand that their father would not be coming home. DEATH IN MEMPHIS Coretta had learned the bare facts of her husband’s death: Dr. King had been shot in the neck while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The assassin had fired a rifle from a room in a boardinghouse across the street from the motel. Both the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King’s closest friend and colleague, and Samuel B. Kyles, a minister fromMemphis, had been with Martin on the balcony moments before his death. They were preparing to attend a local civil rights meeting with several other Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) members, including Jesse Jackson, Hosea Williams, and Andrew Young, who all waited directly below the balcony. Abernathy went back to his room to put on some aftershave; Kyles headed downstairs to the motel parking lot to join the others. When the shot rang out, they all looked up; Dr. King had fallen to the concrete floor of the balcony. Abernathy ran out of his room to see his dear friend lying in a pool of blood. Rushing over to him, he knelt beside Martin and held his head, trying to comfort him. King moved his lips, but he could not speak. One hour later, he was dead. Leaving the funeral home to take her children home, Coretta tried to remain calm. She knew she couldn’t fall apart in front of the children—but, then, it was not Coretta Scott King’s nature to fall apart. She had stood bravely by her husband’s side for all of the 14 years they had been married, through countless

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