ATLANTA (AP) – Thousands of mourners filed past the casket of Coretta Scott King on Monday, paying their respects to the “first lady of the civil rights movement” at the historic church where her husband shared his dream for racial equality in the 1960s.

People lined up for a mile outside Ebenezer Baptist Church, waiting for hours in freezing rain for a moment to bid farewell to the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Across the street, an estimated 1,700 people filled the church’s newer facility for a musical tribute that included Oprah Winfrey and other entertainers such as Gladys Knight.

“For me, she embodied royalty. She was the queen,” Winfrey said. “You knew she was a force.”

Winfrey laughed as she described persuading King to get a new hairdo on her TV show. And she became emotional when she told how King, in the week before her death, sent her a handmade quilt that her husband’s mother had passed down.

“She leaves us all a better America than the America of her childhood,” Winfrey said.

King, 78, died Jan. 30 at an alternative medicine clinic in Mexico, where doctors said she was battling advanced ovarian cancer. She also had been recovering from a stroke and heart attack.

As the afternoon musical tribute concluded, King’s eldest daughter, Yolanda King, told the gathering: “I know it is the prayers of so many of you, and from all over the world, that carried her safely home. We knew firsthand the enduring power of love.”

Civil rights leaders also were to speak late Monday in the same church building at a service featuring the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Rep. John Lewis and the Rev. Joseph Lowery.

The first to speak was Andrew Young, a lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr. who went on to become a congressman, U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor.

“She knew the suffering of the Old South, and she knew you couldn’t let hate get to you,” he said.

Inside the silent sanctuary across the street, more than 46,000 mourners filed slowly past the casket, some lingering a moment before moving on. Many walked away dabbing their eyes at the sight of King’s body, which was dressed in a pink suit, with a shroud of flowers blanketing the lower half of the casket. She lay directly below the pulpit where her husband preached from 1960 until 1968.

First in line was Jackie Treen, 51, who flew from Severn, Md., to Atlanta just to see King’s body.

“I’m an African-American woman married to a white man for 30 years,” Treen said. “I have to be here. Martin and Coretta made it possible for me to have what I have.”

Mary Howard-Hamilton, a college professor from Bloomington, Ind., drove eight hours to Atlanta and then stood in the rain for five more to be among the first to view King’s body at the church.

“It’s almost like the torch was passed when I walked past her,” Howard-Hamilton, 51, said. “I felt empowered. I’m gonna step up now. This fight’s not over.”

During the weekend, some 42,000 mourners walked past King’s open casket at the state Capitol, where she became the first woman and the first black person to lie in honor there. It was a striking contrast to the official snub her slain husband had been given by then-Gov. Lester Maddox, an outspoken segregationist.

President Bush and former President Clinton lead the list of dignitaries expected to attend her funeral Tuesday, to be held at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, a 10,000-seat church in Lithonia where the Kings’ youngest child, Bernice, is a minister. She was scheduled to deliver her mother’s eulogy.

Workers erected a temporary marble mausoleum Monday for King near that of her late husband at the King Center which she founded in his name, said Brandon Shields, president and owner of Marietta-based Roberts-Shields Memorial Company. It will be used until a structure identical to the slain civil rights leader’s can be built.