VIP's at funeral service for Coretta Scott King, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, Lithonia, Georgia: President George W. Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, former President Bill Clinton, New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, former President George H.W. Bush, former President Jimmy Carter, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson and wife Marcia

James Earl "Jimmy" Carter Jr. (born October 1, 1924) served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. Carter, a Democrat from rural Georgia, devotional Baptist, was a peanut farmer. He served seven years' service as a naval officer and two terms as a Georgia State Senator, from 1963 to 1967, and one as the Governor of Georgia, from 1971 to 1975. He was elected President in 1976, defeating President Gerald Ford in a relatively close election. On his second day in office, Carter pardoned all evaders of the Vietnam War drafts. He established a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, and new technology. He confronted persistent "stagflation", a combination of high inflation, high unemployment, and slow growth. In the Middle East, through the Camp David agreement of 1978, Carter helped bring amity between Egypt and Israel. He succeeded in obtaining ratification of the Panama Canal treaties. Building upon the work of predecessors, he established full diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and completed negotiation of the SALT II nuclear limitation treaty with the Soviet Union. The end of his presidential tenure was marked by the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In response to the Soviet move, he ended détente and led the international boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. By 1980, Carter's popularity had eroded and he lost the general election in a landslide to Republican nominee Ronald Reagan, who won 44 of 50 states. "We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war."

William Jefferson Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Prior to the Presidency, he was the 40th Governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and the state's 42nd Governor from 1983 to 1992. Before that, he served as Arkansas Attorney General from 1977 to 1979. Clinton was born on August 19, 1946, at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas; he was named William Jefferson Blythe III. He was the son of William Jefferson Blythe Jr. (1918–1946), a traveling salesman who had died in an automobile accident three months before his birth, and Virginia Dell Cassidy.

Laura Lane Welch Bush (born November 4, 1946) is the wife of the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, and was the First Lady from 2001 to 2009. Bush graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in education, and took a job as a second grade teacher. After attaining her master's degree in library science at the University of Texas at Austin, she was employed as a librarian. Bush is of English, French, and Swiss ancestry. Her father was a home builder and later successful real estate developer, while her mother worked as the bookkeeper for her father's business.

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, born October 26, 1947, is an American politician who was the 67th United States Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, U.S. Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, and the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States in the 2016 election. Born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Clinton graduated from Wellesley College in 1969, and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973.