The Southern Christian Leadership Conference

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act as Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, many of them SCLC founders, look on. White House Photograph Office.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is a civil rights organisation founded in 1957. It grew out of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which had run the successful 381-day boycott of Montgomery, Alabama's segregated buses. Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth and others created it as a regional organisation that could coordinate civil rights protest across the South.

Faith and direct action

• The SCLC was founded at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
• It confronted segregation through "direct action" — boycotts, marches and other forms of nonviolent protest. Many Black Americans considered this controversial, believing segregation should be fought in the courts.
• Most of its leaders were ministers, who believed churches belonged in political activism. They held many meetings in Black churches, which became important symbols of the struggle.

One of the "Big Five"

The SCLC quickly rose to the front of the movement alongside the other major groups known together as the "Big Five": the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Campaigns

• Citizenship schools, and campaigns to desegregate cities such as Albany, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; and St. Augustine, Florida.
• Key roles in the March on Washington (1963) and in the Selma voting rights campaign and march to Montgomery (1965).
• A wider focus on economic inequality, starting the Poor People's Campaign in 1967.

Leaders

The SCLC is still active today as a national and international human rights organisation.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Southern Christian Leadership Conference." https://www.nps.gov/articles/southern-christian-leadership-conference.htm
• The original names Abernathy's successor as "James Lowery"; he was the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery. It also calls CORE the "Congress on Racial Equality"; its name is the Congress of Racial Equality.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.