HistoryAmerican nonsectarian agency with headquarters in Atlanta, Ga., established by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and his followers in 1957 to coordinate and assist local organizations working for the full equality of blacks in all aspects of American life. The organization worked primarily in the South and some border states, conducting leadership-training programs, citizen-education projects, and voter-registration drives. The SCLC played a major part in the civil-rights march on Washington, D.C., in 1963 and in antidiscrimination and voter-registration drives, notably at Albany, Ga., and Birmingham and Selma, Ala., in the early 1960s–campaigns that spurred passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.After King’s assassination in April 1968, his place as president was taken by the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy. While the SCLC maintained its philosophy of nonviolent social change, it soon ceased to mount giant demonstrations and confined itself to smaller campaigns, predominantly in the South. The organization was further weakened by several schisms, including the departure in 1972 of civil-rights leader Jesse L. Jackson and his followers who had staffed Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, which was directed at economic goals.Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), organization of black churches and ministers which formed the backbone of the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. SCLC was founded in 1957 after the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, during 1955 and 1956. The boycott led the Supreme Court of the United States to rule in 1956 in favor of a lower court decision striking down the city’s segregated seating practices. It inspired many black leaders to believe that nonviolent direct action and protests, like the boycott, might succeed in battles against segregation, where the non-confrontational legal strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had yielded only slow change.SCLC’s significance to the civil rights movement centered on a series of highly publicized protest campaigns in the early 1960s. The first came in 1961 in Albany, Georgia, where SCLC led citywide protests intended to create so much resistance to segregated public facilities that local white officials would be forced to end segregation if they wanted to restore order and normal business relations. The strategy, for the most part, was a failure. Despite months of protests, Albany’s police chief jailed so many demonstrators without creating public displays of violence that the protests finally ended.
LeadersDr. Martin Luther King Jr.Ralph AbernathyElla BakerAndrew YoungJesse JacksonBayard RustinHosea WilliamsWyatt T. WalkerFred ShuttleworthJoseph LoweryFoundersDr. Martin Luther King. JrAccomplishmentsBirmingham Protest-In Birmingham, Alabama, in early 1963. SCLC confronted the police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, and escalated the antisegregation marches by encouraging teenagers and school children to join. Connor responded by using attack dogs and high-pressure water hoses against the marchers. When scenes of young protesters being assaulted by dogs and torrents of water from fire hoses were shown on television, support for the civil rights movement increased. The demonstrations eventually resulted in negotiations in the spring of 1963 that desegregated restrooms, drinking fountains, lunch counters, and fitting rooms throughout Birmingham. Business leaders also agreed to hire and promote more black employees.Civil Rights Act of 1964The act outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations, as well as discrimination by employers, unions, or voting registrars.Selma March/ Voting Rights Act of 1965The act suspended (and amendments to the act later banned) the use of literacy or other voter qualification tests that had sometimes been used to prevent blacks from voting.Poor People’s CampaignSCLC led the long-planned march and encampment in Washington, D.C., in May 1968. The campaign had limited success overall, but it did prompt the federal government to provide food aid to the neediest U.S. counties and pressured the U.S. Senate to approve a bill to fund the construction of low-income housingGoals/PurposeKing established a headquarters in a Chicago apartment in 1966, using that as a base to organize protests against housing and employment discrimination in the city.In 1968 King conceived and planned the Poor People’s Campaign, including a march on Washington, D.C., that was intended to draw attention to the relationship between poverty and urban violence.It works to gain equal rights for African Americans and other minority groups through nonviolent civil protest and community development programs. Changes madeFoundationThe Kansas City SCLC Foundation for African-American Achievement is the charitable arm of the Greater Kansas City Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The foundation was created to allow the local chapter to receive charitable contributions to further the causes of the chapter at a local level. Then/NowOppose/AdvocateCourt Cases, Laws Passed, MovementsCritical ResponsesFamous SpeechesI Have a DreamInfluences/Effect