# Negro Woman Wins High Office: Constance Baker Motley on a 1965 USIA news sheet

Pictures in the News No. 7, an English photo sheet from the U.S. Information Agency's Beirut series, catalog date 20 June 1965. Under a strip of fourteen African stamps honoring John F. Kennedy, its lead story is headed "Negro Woman Wins High Office In New York City," on Constance Baker Motley as the new Manhattan Borough President (NAID 6949193).

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      Pictures in the News poster, No. 7 (English poster distributed in Beirut)

      Negro Woman Wins High Office: Constance Baker Motley on a 1965 USIA news sheet
      A 1965 USIA photo sheet from Beirut leads with "Negro Woman Wins High Office," on Constance Baker Motley, under fourteen African stamps for Kennedy.

## Techniques named on the archive record

TransferTestimonial
      DateJune 20, 1965Made byU.S. Information Agency (predecessor: State Department International Information and Educational Exchange Program), Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East seriesMediumPosterCountryUnited StatesRegimeJohnson AdministrationNARANAID 6949193; Record Group 306SourceUnidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosureSourceU.S. National Archives (NARA), Record Group 306, Posters in Asia, Latin America, Middle East , retrieved October 4, 2026SourcePublic domain (U.S. government work; NARA RG 306) U.S. Information Agency / Department of State, June 20, 1965. National Archives, Record Group 306 (NAID 6949193, 306-PPB-269).
      Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

      Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  Pictures in the News No. 7, an English photo sheet from the U.S. Information Agency's Beirut series, catalog date 20 June 1965. Under a strip of fourteen African stamps honoring John F. Kennedy, its lead story is headed "Negro Woman Wins High Office In New York City," on Constance Baker Motley as the new Manhattan Borough President (NAID 6949193).

## The sheet

Across the top run fourteen postage stamps from African states, all honoring President Kennedy, each labeled with its country. Below them, eight captioned photographs. A Negro History Week beauty queen in New York. Senator Robert Kennedy welcoming a student from Sierra Leone. Lew Alcindor, seventeen and seven feet one. A Nigerian mother and son flown to the United States for a kidney transplant. President Johnson shaking hands with children in Alexandria, Virginia. A UN economic meeting in Nairobi. Students from forty countries at the Lincoln Memorial. The lead story is the first after the stamps.

Negro Woman Wins High Office In New York City

The new president of the Borough of Manhattan is Mrs. Constance Baker Motley, first woman ever to hold this important post. She is the most highly paid woman public official in the United States. Mrs. Motley also was the first Negro woman to be elected a New York State senator. Manhattan, one of New York's five boroughs, has 1.7 million people.

Lead caption, FRAME transcription; sheet code 65-P-133 (16). Full record at propagandaarchive.org. NARA RG 306, NAID 6949193, local id 306-PPB-269.

## Who made it

The U.S. Information Agency's Pictures in the News series, distributed from Beirut. The sheet prints the series name and a code. It prints no agency name, and FRAME classes the source as blurred. The National Archives files it in Record Group 306.

## How to read it

The headline uses the period's word, "Negro," as the agency printed it, and it makes race the news. The sheet reads as an answer to readers who had heard about American segregation, and every item on it points the same way: firsts, honors, African students welcomed in Washington, African governments honoring an American president. FRAME tags it transfer and testimonial. The stamps lend African approval to the whole page, and the Lincoln Memorial lends its own.

The facts in the lead caption are a real achievement, and printing them was not dishonest. A Black woman at the head of Manhattan's borough government in 1965 was news anywhere. The selection is the argument. A reader of this sheet would learn that America elects Black women to high office. The same reader would not learn from it that Mississippi's Sovereignty Commission had voted the Citizens' Councils public money, or that the FBI had counted the Southern Christian Leadership Conference among its targets. Both are on this site, in the Citizens' Councils case study and COINTELPRO and the press.

That is the ordinary limit of a government talking about itself. At home, a free press could print the rest. An earlier number, No. 5, went further and reported a church burned after a civil rights rally. The period is gathered on US civil rights era messaging, 1954–1969.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, Pictures in the News poster, No. 7 (English poster distributed in Beirut), catalog date 20 June 1965.

- U.S. National Archives, Record Group 306, Posters in Asia, Latin America, Middle East, NAID 6949193 (306-PPB-269), retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/pictures-in-the-news-7-english-beirut-1965/