King Breakfast Cancelled
Rick Margolis -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2001
The Coretta Scott King Awards Breakfast, the nation's premier event honoring African-American children's book writers and illustrators, was cancelled. Amid growing concerns that award recipients and ticket holders would have to cross picket lines outside the San Francisco Marriott to attend the event, the Coretta Scott King Awards Task Force of the American Library Association Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT), the event's sponsor, issued a statement calling off this year's celebration. The popular awards breakfast, scheduled for June 19, was to have taken place during the American Library Association's annual conference in San Francisco.
The task force's June 4 statement, issued by Chair Carole McCollough, came just three days after the group had received a letter from King, requesting that the breakfast be moved from the San Francisco Marriott, the site of a labor dispute, to a new location. "I have always been proud of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards, which affirm the values of compassion, social justice, and humanitarian concerns," wrote King. "However, I also have long supported the struggles of working people for union representation, decent wages and working conditions, and the thought of recipients of the Awards having to cross a picket line of working people to receive their honors is very disturbing to me."
The decision to cancel the event may end up costing SRRT a substantial amount of money. Under an agreement that was negotiated in 1997 with the Marriott, the ALA unit must pay a $24,200 cancellation fee. In addition, $28,000 worth of tickets—700 tickets at $40 each—had been purchased for the event. Ticket holders will have the option of seeking a full refund or donating the price of their tickets toward deferring the cancellation debt.
The cancellation was expected to mean that award winners would have to wait to receive their awards and would need to put their acceptance speeches on hold. (The text of the speeches will be published in next month's SLJ.)
Writer Jacqueline Woodson won this year's King Author Award for Miracle's Boys (Penguin Putnam, 2000), a novel about the challenges of growing up in New York City without parents. And author-illustrator Bryan Collier won the 2001 CSK Illustration Award for Uptown (Holt, 2000), a vivid look at life in Harlem.
Collier's reaction to the cancellation was gracious. "When I first heard it, I was saddened," he said, "not for myself, but for the whole slew of people who [were] looking forward to the breakfast—they're regular people, working people.... On the other hand, I do understand the position that Mrs. King has taken and I support it. In terms of awards, they're fine… but there are bigger issues that loom, and I'm totally in support of what has happened."
