Bush creates MLK scholarship

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – President Bush honored the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday by announcing the creation of new federal scholarships encouraging young people to study education and public policy.

The administration also said it will propose increasing federal funding for colleges and universities that traditionally attract black and Hispanic students by $12 million over current levels.

Starting this summer, the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholars Program will take as many as 10 outstanding undergraduate and graduate students and make them paid interns in the office of the secretary at the Education Department, White House officials said.

In the White House’s East Room, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King; his son, Martin Luther King III; and daughter, the Rev. Bernice King, presented Bush with a portrait of the slain civil rights leader.

Thousands gathered across the country Monday to pay tribute to King and his message of unity and equality.

In Atlanta, a standing-room-only crowd of about 2,000 packed the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the civil rights leader once preached. Assassinated in 1968 at age 39, King would have turned 73 last Tuesday.

First lady Laura Bush, who also attended the service, called King “a man committed to peace and a man committed to change.”

King’s widow asked people to use the holiday as a day of service, as did Martin Luther King III in Detroit.

“We don’t see it as a day off,” he said. “We see it as a day on in which people can be involved in community service.”

The Texas League of United Latin American Citizens and the Texas NAACP, two of Texas’ largest minority organizations, announced they were joining forces to fight racial inequality.

In Raleigh, N.C., about 700 people marched in the rain to the antebellum former state Capitol for speeches recalling King’s life and work. Hundreds also braved the rain to protest the Confederate flag on Statehouse grounds in South Carolina.