Founder and Executive Director African American Museum of History and Culture at Loray Mill
The Coretta Scott King Book Awards have grown tremendously since their conception in the late 1960s. The award was founded by Glyndon Greer and Mable McKissack both school librarians as well as John Carroll, a book publisher and distributor. At a dinner gala of the New Jersey Library Association in May 1970, Lillie Patterson was honored for her biography Martin Luther King, Jr.: Man of Peace. In 1972, the first Coretta Scott King Book Awards breakfast was held at an ALA conference site. The committee honored an illustrator for the first time in 1974, awarded to George Ford for his illustrations in Ray Charles. That year, the Coretta Scott King seal was designed by Lev Mills, an internationally renowned artist in Atlanta, to identify book jackets of award winners.
Official affiliation with the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) came in 1980, and in 1982, the American Library Association recognized the Coretta Scott King Book Award as an official association award. In 2003, the Coretta Scott King Task Force joined the Ethnic and Multicultural Information Exchange Round Table (EMIERT). The affiliation with EMIERT gave the group a new name: the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Committee. In the fall of 2022, the awards committee became an American Library Association Round Table and an official unit of ALA governance; presently known as the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Round Table (CSKBART) .
Success of the award can be attributed to the work of tireless volunteers and visionary founders