Leaflet for a meeting at Conway Hall to protest racial discrimination, October 1943
King was refused entry to the Land Army by its
Essex County branch committee because it was believed it would be difficult to place her, as there would be objections due to her ethnicity.[3][5][6][7][8][9][10] With support from the Holborn Trades Council, King presented the issue to her local representative,
Walter Edwards MP, who raised the issue of racism within the Land Army at the
House of Commons.[2][11] This, along with another
racially-motivated incident that occurred within the same week in which cricketer
Learie Constantine was denied accommodation at a London hotel, attracted widespread controversy and criticism and brought the '
Colour Bar' into focus.[12][13][14]
In an interview with
George Padmore, published in The Chicago Defender, King reflected "I said to them, if I'm not good enough to work on the land, then I am not good enough to make munitions. No one has ever suggested that my father and brother were not good enough to fight for the freedom of England."[2]
The refusal was reversed and King was able to formally join the Women's Land Army in October 1943.[5][15][16] She worked at Frith Farm in
Fareham,
Hampshire until 1944.[1][6]
King died at the Royal London Hospital in
Whitechapel in 1995, aged 78.[1]
^Lindsey, Lydia; Wilson, Carlton E. (1 January 1994). "Spurring a Dialogue to Place the African European Experience Within the Context of an Afrocentric Philosophy". Journal of Black Studies. 25 (1): 41–61.
doi:
10.1177/002193479402500103.
JSTOR2784413.
S2CID144321312.
^Smith, Graham A. (30 June 2010). "Jim Crow on the home front (1942–1945)". Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 8 (3): 317–328.
doi:
10.1080/1369183X.1980.9975641.