Martin Luther King's eldest daughter dies

Atlanta, May 17: Yolanda King, the eldest daughter of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, has died in California.

Media reports yesterday said she died late on Tuesday, possibly from a heart problem.

Yolanda, 51, supported the work started by her father and pursued a career as a human rights worker and actress. In one TV mini-series she played Rosa Parks, whose refusal to relinquish her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama sparked the civil rights movement in 1955.

''Yolanda was the torch bearer for her parents and a committed activist in her own right,'' New York civil rights activist and preacher Al Sharpton said in a statement.

Her first year of life coincided with a boycott aimed at ending segregation on buses in Montgomery. The successful campaign launched the civil rights movement and gave her father a national platform.

She was too young to remember the night the family home in Montgomery was bombed by whites in a bid to halt that campaign, but civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said her life was marked by the trauma the King family experienced during the civil rights era.

''She was a child when their home was bombed. She remembers when he was stabbed. She remembers when he was jailed in Birmingham (Alabama) and when he was killed,'' Jackson said in an interview.

''She internalized it. She handled it with a great sense of character. She was a renowned speaker. She used it as an example of an exemplary life. She handled adulthood with great strength,'' he said.

''She leaves a great legacy of women who fought for dignity, decency and equality.'' King, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, was assassinated in 1968. His wife and Yolanda's mother, Coretta Scott King, was a civil rights leader in her own right who died last year.

''Just being a King in its own right brought about its own stress where she and the entire family was under scrutiny on a daily basis and I think she dealt with it very well,'' said Charles Steele, a family friend and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization founded by Martin Luther King.

Reuters>