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May 16, 2007
Martin Luther King's Eldest Daughter Dies
By REUTERS

Filed at 9:19 a.m. ET

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Yolanda King, the eldest daughter of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, has died in California, family friends said on Wednesday.

Media reports 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.

She was born in the middle of a year-long 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.

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.