King’s Widow Calls for End to Gulf War : Commemoration: The wife of the slain civil rights leader remembers him as an advocate of nonviolence.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow and others observing today’s federal holiday marking the civil rights leader’s birthday remembered him as an advocate of nonviolence and urged an immediate halt to the Persian Gulf war.

“Our most urgent short-term priority at the international level is a cease-fire in the Persian Gulf,” Coretta Scott King said in her annual State of the Dream speech Sunday at Ebenezer Baptist church.

In Texas, Girl Scouts in a Dallas parade honoring King on Saturday carried a 10-foot-long banner saying, “King’s dream did not include war.”

Today’s holiday winds up 10 days of celebrations marking King’s birthday. Assassinated in 1968, the civil rights leader would have turned 62 on Jan. 15. The federal holiday is observed on the third Monday of January.

In the 22nd annual King ecumenical service this morning at Ebenezer, where King and his father were co-pastors, Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson said he was angered by war-related polls showing that many white Americans believe that blacks who oppose the war are unpatriotic.

“Let’s set the record straight,” he said. “The ethnic group that has produced the fewest number of traitors in time of war is Afro-Americans.”

Jackson noted that a large percentage of blacks are serving with the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf.

“The reason why so many black people volunteered is because the options available to us on the outside are so few,” he said, calling on blacks to renew their vigilance in fighting for equal rights.

A rally honoring King was scheduled today in Helena, Mont. Montana, Arizona and New Hampshire are the only states where his birthday still is not a paid state holiday.

The federal holiday brought racists to the streets in Blacksburg, Va., and Albany, N.Y., on Sunday, but they were greatly outnumbered by civil rights advocates.

About 500 people taunted 30 Ku Klux Klan members who marched in Blacksburg surrounded by more than 200 police officers.

At the State Capitol in Albany, a handful of Klan members were pelted with snowballs and eggs when they showed up to for a rally planned to protest the holiday. The rally never took place. Two counter-demonstrations attracted an estimated 1,500 people.

In Atlanta, Mrs. King appealed to a packed audience at the Ebenezer sanctuary “to become involved in working to stop this war.”

“The end of the Cold War should have brought a peace dividend in the form of a greater federal investment in human development,” she said.

She cited estimates that the gulf war this year will cost more than $140 billion, money needed for education and job training.