Southern Christian Leadership Conference

In 1957 a group of young southern ministers formed an organization in Atlanta, Georgia , called the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration. These ministers shared a belief that the black church should play an important role in the African American civil rights movement . They created a coalition—a combination of different organizations in one overall structure—comprised of local civil rights organizations and churches. The group's name soon changed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The new organization was led by civil rights activists Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) and Joseph Lowery (1921–). King, already one of the nation's most famous civil rights activists due to his role in the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956 in Alabama , gave the organization immediate renown. He would head the SCLC until his assassination in

1968, and for many Americans the SCLC was “his” organization. Lowery was SCLC's president from 1977 to 1997.

Goals and methods

Montgomery's bus boycott had convinced SCLC founders that a mass protest movement could desegregate (stop policies and laws that separated black and white people in public places) the South. The boycott, a year-long nonviolent campaign in which blacks refused to ride the segregated buses, had resulted in a Supreme Court order to end bus segregation in Montgomery. As the SCLC established its purpose in the wake of this success, some of its immediate aims were: to register black voters and obtain political representation in local and national government; to draw national attention to the plight of southern blacks; and to pressure the federal government to step in and protect the constitutional rights of blacks.

From the start the SCLC was built on a philosophy of nonviolent direct action (see Civil Disobedience ) based on the teachings of Jesus Christ and Indian political leader Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948). King repeatedly emphasized active nonviolence to members of SCLC. Protesters were trained not to inflict physical harm on others. King warned that those who wished to join in nonviolent action might be beaten, humiliated, insulted, or arrested, but they were never to strike or even insult those who tried to harm them. The fight was between justice and injustice, not individual people.

Early accomplishments

In 1960 SCLC helped create a student civil rights organization, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), from the emerging sitin movement . SNCC went on to become one of the most active nonviolent protest civil rights organizations in the early 1960s.

In late 1961 SCLC began desegregation campaigns in Albany, Georgia. Their work there was met with violence in August 1962, when members of the Ku Klux Klan (a secret white supremacist society known for its methods of intimidation and terrorism against minority groups) burned Albany's black churches. In 1963 SCLC undertook a long and dangerous protest campaign in highly segregated Birmingham, Alabama (see Birmingham Protests ), calling for desegregation and economic justice.

Also in 1963 the SCLC helped promote the civil rights March on Washington , the largest demonstration for human rights the country had ever seen. At the march King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, electrifying his huge audience of a quarter of a million people with one of the most famous speeches in U.S. history. In 1965 King, as head of the SCLC, led a march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery to extend voting rights to black Americans. Black marchers in the first attempt at this march, later known as “Bloody Sunday,” were attacked by state and local police, stopping the march. The televised scenes of violence brought about strong national support for black voting rights.

The most concrete rewards for the SCLC's campaigns came when the federal government finally lent its support to the civil rights movement with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act . Though these acts did not reach as far as hoped, they set significant milestones in desegregation and voting rights, particularly in the South.

After 1968

By 1968 there were strong divisions within the civil rights movement between those advocating nonviolent action and those who called for a more combative struggle. The SCLC suffered from the conflicts, losing membership and focus. King led his organization as before, using nonviolent methods and basing actions on religious beliefs. But before his death King's emphasis had changed from strictly African American civil rights to economic reform. His interests were drawn to poverty, the plight of blacks in northern cities, and the lot of low-income workers everywhere. His strong opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1954–75) blurred the focus of the SCLC from its once solid concentration on the civil rights of African Americans.

When King was assassinated in 1968, the SCLC maintained its philosophy of nonviolent social change but it no longer initiated large-scale national actions. Longtime civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy (1926–1990), who succeeded King as head of the SCLC, directed the organization's efforts in the Poor People's Campaign. This project focused national attention on the needs of poor people in the United States, especially food aid and low-income housing. Without King, though, the campaign failed to win public support.

Following the Poor People's Campaign, the SCLC went into a steady decline. Today, though rarely in the public eye, the SCLC continues to organize, educate, and register voters in the southern United States. The SCLC also focuses on problems within the black community, including crime and drug abuse.