User:Balance person/Martin Luther King Fund and Foundation, UK

The Martin Luther King Fund and Foundation was set up as a UK charity on December 30, 1969, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, USA on April 4, 1968, and following a visit to the UK in 1969 by his widow, Coretta King.

Its first chairman, Canon. L. John Collins stated that the Foundation’s aims were to be an active national campaign for racial equality, its work also to include community projects in areas of social need, and education. International Personnel (IP), an employment agency, was formed in 1970 out of the foundation’s base in Balham, in London’s Inner Ring South, to find employment for professionally qualified black people. The staff of IP included the manager, deputy manager, branch assistant and detached itinerant interviewer. In its first year, the agency placed ten percent of its applicants in jobs equal to their ability.

The Branch Assistant, Barbara Gray, went on to become the Mayoress of Lewisham in April 2019, and was also asked to become the Mayor and Council Adviser on Black, Minority Ethnic (BME) health inequalities.

The Balham Training Scheme operated an evening school at the premises in South London and had a director, co-ordinator and five lecturers in Typing, Shorthand, English and Maths.

Finances
The Balham Training Scheme tutors were paid by the Inner London Education Authority via Brixton College of Further Education. Apart from individual small donations from individuals, large organisations also gave financial support. An example is The Barrow Cadbury Fund Ltd who made a series of gradually decreasing grants from £7,760 in 1972 to £2,100 in 1974.

The MLKFF also supported other projects. Originally funded by The Martin Luther King Foundation and Christian Aid and later funded by Islington Council, the Martin Luther King Foundation Adventure Playground has welcomed generations of Islington’s children to play.

1975 Memorial Lecture
The 1975 Martin Luther King Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘Black People and Employment’, was given in the Mahatma Gandhi Hall of the Indian YMCA in London on May 6, 1975, by The Rt. Revd David Sheppard who was chairman of the fund until his appointment as Bishop of Liverpool in June 1975.

1989 Memorial Lecture
In the late 1970s, Wilfred Wood, a Barbadian-British Anglican, Bishop of Croydon from 1985 to 2003, the first black bishop in the Church of England, and instrumental in the founding of MLKFF, became its chair.

The 1989 Martin Luther King Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘To Overcome is to Undertake’, was given by the Rt Rev. Wilfred Wood, Bishop of Croydon.

The MLKFF was removed from the Charity Commission list on November 18, 1996, as it had ceased to exist.