Published Feb. 2, 2006
Plains — Jimmy Carter remembered Coretta Scott King on Tuesday as a friend whose support was essential to putting him in the White House.
“I could never have been elected president if it had not been for Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife,” he told reporters outside his office here. “Her confidence in me ... reassured a lot of the rest of the nation that a Southern governor from Georgia who had been a peanut farmer was still enlightened on the basic elements of human rights.”
Carter remembered visiting King at her home during his 1970 run for governor. Once in office, he hung a portrait of her late husband in the State Capitol, drawing Ku Klux Klan protests.
Six years later, King and her father-in-law, Martin Luther King Sr., known as Daddy King, helped carry Carter through one of the roughest passages of his presidential campaign. During the primaries, the candidate drew fire for saying that people should be allowed to maintain the “ethnic purity” of their neighborhoods.
“She gave me a call and said when I came back to Atlanta, she wanted the world to know that she and Daddy King had confidence in me,” Carter recalled.
He later presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to King, awarded posthumously to her husband.
“She was one of the strongest and most able and enlightened women I’ve ever known,” Carter said.
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