The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an African-American civil rights organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. SCLC is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had a large role in the American civil rights movement.
Founding
On January 10, 1957, following the Montgomery bus boycott victory against the white establishment and consultations with Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and others, Martin Luther King Jr. invited about 60 black ministers and leaders to Ebenezer Church in Atlanta. Prior to this, Rustin, in New York City, conceived the idea of initiating such an effort and first sought C. K. Steele to make the call and take the lead role. Steele declined, but told Rustin he would be glad to work right beside him if he sought King in Montgomery for the role. Their goal was to form an organization to coordinate and support nonviolent direct action as a method of desegregating bus systems across the South. In addition to King, Rustin, Baker, and Steele, Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, Joseph Lowery of Mobile, and Ralph Abernathy of Montgomery, all played key roles in this meeting. The group continued this initial meeting on January 11, calling it (in keeping with the recent bus segregation issue) a Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration when they held a press conference that day. The press conference allowed them to introduce their efforts: communicating what they had included in telegrams sent that day to applicable members of the executive branch of the U.S. government (President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, and Attorney General Brownell) sharing an outline of their overall position regarding the restrictions against the "elementary democratic rights [of America's] Negro minority" and providing a short list of concerns they wished to raise with "white Southerners of goodwill".
On February 15, a follow-up meeting was held in New Orleans. Out of these two meetings came a new organization with King as its president. Shortening the name used for their January meetings, the group briefly called their organization Negro Leaders Conference on Nonviolent Integration, then Southern Negro Leaders Conference. King served as president, Steele as first vice president, A.L. Davis as second vice president, T. J. Jemison as secretary, Medgar Evers as assistant secretary, Abernathy as treasurer, and Shuttlesworth as historian. At its third meeting, in August 1957, the group settled on Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as its name, expanding its focus beyond buses to ending all forms of segregation. A small office was established in the Prince Hall Masonic Temple Building on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta with Ella Baker as SCLC's first—and for a long time only—staff member.
SCLC was governed by an elected board, and established as an organization of affiliates, most of which were either individual churches or community organizations such as the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). This organizational form differed from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who recruited individuals and formed them into local chapters.
The organization also drew inspiration from the crusades of evangelist Billy Graham, who befriended King after he appeared at a Graham crusade in New York City in 1957. Despite tactical differences, which arose from Graham's willingness to continue affiliating himself with segregationists, the SCLC and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association had similar ambitions and Graham would privately advise the SCLC.
During its early years, SCLC struggled to gain footholds in black churches and communities across the South. Social activism in favor of racial equality faced fierce repression from the police, White Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan. Only a few churches had the courage to defy the white-dominated status-quo by affiliating with SCLC, and those that did risked economic retaliation against pastors and other church leaders, arson, and bombings.