SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE

SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE. Led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was the first major civil rights organization to originate in the South and was one of the guiding forces behind the black freedom struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. The SCLC brought the black church into the forefront of the civil rights movement and helped popularize the tactic of massive nonviolent protest.

The SCLC was founded in early 1957. King and two associates, the Reverend Charles K. Steele and the Reverend Fred L. Shuttles worth, recognized the need to capitalize on the momentum generated by the Montgomery bus boycott of the previous year and called a meeting of black preachers to found the organization. Although the SCLC made little headway in its first few years, in 1960 the spreading sit-in movement among college students energized the organization. The SCLC sponsored the meeting of student protestors that led to the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. In 1961, King and the SCLC played a role in the Freedom Rides, which challenged segregation on interstate buses. In 1963 and 1964, the SCLC joined other civil rights organizations in a major project designed to register rural black Mississippians to vote.

The organization was best known, however, for a series of demonstrations it staged in southern cities in an attempt to combat segregation and disfranchisement by focusing national and international attention on the region's Jim Crow practices. The SCLC's 1963 campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, provoked a violent police reaction that aroused the conscience of many white Americans and put international pressure on President John F. Kennedy to act decisively on civil rights. The bill President Kennedy delivered to Congress that June formed the basis of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1965, King and the SCLC launched a campaign of marches and demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, that eventually contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, King and the SCLC increasingly turned their attention to creating an interracial alliance of the poor and oppressed. They worked to win housing desegregation and jobs for blacks in Chicago, and to organize a Poor People's March in Washington, D.C., in April 1968. The SCLC, however, faced growing opposition from young blacks, who were increasingly frustrated with the organization's willingness to compromise with whites and with its nonviolent tactics. At the same time, King's outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam infuriated President Johnson and lost the SCLC the support of some wealthy and influential white liberals. After King's assassination in 1968, the organization was wracked by internal division and lost its preeminent place in the black freedom struggle. The SCLC continues to fight for civil rights.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marable, Manning. Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

Sitkoff, Harvard. The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1992. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. New York: Viking, 1987.

WendyWall

See alsoCivil Rights Movement ; Jim Crow Laws ; Voting Rights Act of 1965 .