It was particularly fitting that the first Coretta Scott King Award was presented to Lillie Patterson, a librarian in Baltimore, for her elementary level biography "Martin Luther King, Jr.: Man of Peace". The award's first presentation was held during the 1970 New Jersey Library Association conference in Atlantic City, and its second at the corresponding conference in 1971. Early sponsors of the award included the New Jersey Library Association, and the library councils of the Englewood Middle School and Dwight Morrow High School.