Back in 1968, Coretta Scott King stood as a symbol of strength for black America, helping African Americans cope with the loss of their leader.

Much the same way Jacqueline Kennedy provided comfort to a mourning nation after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Coretta Scott King’s public presence in the days following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offered solace to African Americans during a turbulent decade marked by bombings, lynchings, and mob violence.

When cities across the nation erupted in riots following King’s death, his widow urged calm, telling African Americans their voices could best be heard through the ballot box and not through the wanton use of violence.

Certainly, Coretta Scott King had enough reasons to believe the promise of freedom would never be extended to African Americans. After all, hateful forces in this country killed her husband.

When she married the civil rights leader in 1953, King had no idea that a year later her husband would be catapulted into a national campaign aimed at integrating the public bus system in Montgomery, Ala.

But she remained a faithful foot soldier, risking her family’s personal security because she believed in the forces of equality. She remained undeterred, even after the FBI attempted to break up her marriage by secretly taping illicit conversations her husband had with other women and sending them to her.

FBI officials hoped that King would publicly leave her husband and redirect the press’s attention away from the civil rights movement.

That never happened.

She kept her personal life guarded and remained faithful to the cause for which her husband gave his life.

Following King’s assassination, Coretta Scott King found healing in the support of close friends including the widows of Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Both women had lost their husbands earlier to assassins’ bullets.

“She and I, along with Betty Shabazz, were members of a club that no wants to join – the ‘widow of,'” Myrlie Evers-Williams told me. Her husband, an NAACP leader in Mississippi, was gunned down in 1963 by a white supremacist, Byron De La Beckwith. “We shared the challenges of raising our children without their fathers; we shared the challenges of bearing our husbands’ legacies with dignity; we shared the challenges of the ever-shifting civil rights movement. And, through it all, she maintained her graciousness while impacting the world’s politics with her strength and sophisticated influence.”

In her later years, King emerged from the shadow of her husband, but fought vigorously to maintain his legacy. She became an outspoken critic of the proliferation of hand guns and expressed distress over the large number of African Americans killed in acts of violence.

“The value of life in our cities has become as cheap as the price of a gun,” she said in a 1994 speech. “In this country, we vigorously regulate the sale of medicine and severely limit the advertising of cigarettes because of their effect on human health, but we allow anyone in America to buy a gun and virtually everyone in the nation to see graphic violence,” she said.

In 1968, she founded the King Center, dedicated to nonviolent social change. Millions of dollars were raised for center’s mission of alleviating hunger and unemployment, protecting voting rights, and fighting racism.

I first met King some six years ago while working as a newspaper reporter. Perhaps time heals wounds, for as we talked about her husband’s life, I detected no anger and bitterness. She talked about the need for a loving community in which racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia would be things of the past.

With the death of Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, and the civil rights lawyer and judge Constance Baker Motley, we have lost the greatest generation of African-American women, stalwart partners in the fight for social justice.

During the civil rights era, largely played out in public through male leadership, African-American women like King provided the glue that held the movement together. At the same time, these women had to deal with real threats aimed at their children, their husbands, and their community.

This double duty, of gracefully serving both family and movement, is a gift that Coretta Scott King and others gave to our country and world.