An Image of Coretta Scott King, Poster in Hand
On Nov. 1, 1963, 350 women picketed the United Nations headquarters in New York City. They were members of Women Strike for Peace, a grass-roots antiwar organization that pushed for global disarmament and warned of the potential harm of nuclear weapons testing on the health of children.
The New York Times covered the demonstration, which marked the organization's second anniversary. Accompanying the article was a photograph that showed the women as they marched on United Nations Plaza. A prominent figure leads the crowd: Coretta Scott King, an activist and the wife of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
According to the article, Mrs. King helped to lead the march and addressed the women in the Church Center for the United Nations. Mrs. King was quoted in the article saying 'there will be no peace outside our nation until there is peace within.' She later joined Dagmar Wilson, a founder of Women Strike for Peace, for a similar event in Washington.
A few months ago, another image of Mrs. King from the U.N. march was discovered on a contact sheet in The Times's archive libraries. The portrait was taken by the Times photographer Neal Boenzi, who worked at the paper for more than 40 years and was known for the New York City street scenes he captured. (He died in 2023 at age 97.)
The image shows Mrs. King, wearing a hat and gloves, holding a poster sign that reads: 'Let's Make Our Earth a Nuclear-Free Zone.' Though similar images have of Mrs. King from the event been published elsewhere, this frame had gone unseen, until now.
During her life, Mrs. King, a leading voice in the civil rights movement, championed women's rights, racial equality and other social issues and spoke out against apartheid in South Africa. In the years after her husband's assassination, she led the charge to introduce a federal holiday in his name and founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
She understood, and preached, that women were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement. On June 19, 1968, at the Poor People's Campaign at the Lincoln Memorial, she encouraged women 'to unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war.'
She died in 2006 at age 78. Per her Times obituary, 'Mrs. King has been seen as an inspirational figure, a woman of enormous spiritual depth who came to personify the ideals Dr. King fought for.'
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