Posted by Frank James at 11:01 am CST

Some people's lives define the words dignity, courage and perseverance. Coretta Scott King was one.

Since first being thrust into the public eye so many years ago as the wife of a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she has seemed one of the most dignified Americans of our time, maybe of all times.

It was that regal bearing with which she carried herself, that intense sense of self-worth, that embodied the highest meaning of the civil-rights movement of which she was such an important part, the idea captured by the placards many protesters of the era carried: I AM A MAN.

Who can deny her courage? For years before her husband's murder, she knew he would likely die violently. She saw the violence first hand. The Montgomery, Ala. home she shared with Dr. King was bombed when she was there with their first baby.

And she resisted the efforts of the mighty J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation to destroy her and Dr. King when the FBI delivered to her house its surveillance tapes of her her husband's infidelity.

Through all of that, she persevered. Through her husband's assassination in 1968 and decades-long widowhood. The civil-rights martyr left her with very little money or insurance. Yet, she managed to raise their four children to successful, though sometimes controversial, adulthood.

It was her tenacity that helped keep his memory vibrant: through the King Center in Atlanta and the national holiday, an everlasting memorial to him, for which she lobbied so hard.

It was that same indomitability that struck me and so many others at times as stubborness and wrongheadedness. How could her family "own" Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech and other works when those creations rightfully seemed to belong to the world?

But character traits can't be turned off and on with a switch. The same internal force that won her the respect of millions also led to some of those decisions of hers I disagreed with. But I respect her for standing her ground, which she always seemed to do, in her extraordinary American life.