A typed letter found in a box of papers indicates that Coretta Scott King gave a speech at St. James United Church in Montreal in February of….
Well I wish I could tell you the year but the letter isn’t dated! Someone has written 1965-66 on it in pencil, then scratched that out.
A history of St. James by Rob Bull includes the following line: “In the 1970’s, keeping its place as a centre for public discourse after her husband was killed, Coretta Scott King addressed a large gathering of United Church Women at the church.”
There’s a great deal of difference of course whether the appearance took place in 1966 - which would have been before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King - or the 1970s, which would put it after. The event was indeed organized by the Presbyterial UCW, but as the letter also shows, it was not only a gathering of women.
Our own Shirley Stark remembers attending the event, although she couldn’t be sure of the year.
“I saw her at St. James. The place was jammed to the rafters. I sat up in the balcony.”
If she had to guess, Shirley would put the event in 1969.
“I was working as secretary at Chalmers,” Shirley says, “and I started there in the mid-sixties.”
Shirley remembers Ada Scoates, and thinks she hadn’t been President of the Presbyterial UCW for very long when this appearance was organized.
I wish I had a transcript of what Mrs. King said on that night of February 23rd, in 1969 or maybe 1970. We know that she tried very hard immediately following King’s assassination to carry on his work, even sometimes speaking from notes that he had left. She helped make sure that his vision for a Poor Peoples Campaign did not die. Not three months after his assassination, Mrs. King was among the speakers at the National Mall in Washington, the site of a protest camp demanding economic justice for all people.
Dr. King had also been scheduled to address the Harvard graduating class that June. Mrs. King stepped in and as you can hear in the clip below, she did not hesitate to speak out against the Vietnam war.
Coretta Scott King passed away on Jan. 30, 2006, at the age of 78.
If anyone else has memories of Mrs. King’s speech at St. James, we would love to hear them!
Complete text of the letter:
To Our Ministers
Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., from Atlanta, Georgia, will be the guest speaker at the evening session of the Annual Meeting ofthe Montreal Presbyterial United Church Women, to be held on Thursday, February 23rd, at St. James United Church.
I would be very grateful if you would make use of the contents of the enclosed flyer to make this meeting known to all the members of your congregation, either by announcement or in the church calendar.
We feel that this outstanding speaker will be of great interest to all. May we look forward to meeting you and members of your congregation (both men and women) on this occasion?
Yours sincerely,
Ada M. Scoates
President, Montreal Presbyterial
United Church Women
