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, after the victory of the Montgomery Bus Boycott against the white establishment, Pastor Martin Luther King invited some sixty black pastors and leaders to Atlanta's Ebenezer Church. Among the principal guests were pastors Charles Kenzie Steele and Fred Shuttlesworth and activist Bayard Rustin.

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 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 13-14, a follow-up meeting was held in New Orleans, at the New Zion Baptist Church at the corner of Third and LaSalle Streets. Out of this meeting 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 and also Southern Leadership 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.

SCLC's advocacy of boycotts and other forms of nonviolent protest was controversial among both whites and blacks. Many black community leaders believed that segregation should be challenged in the courts and that direct action excited white resistance, hostility, and violence. Traditionally, leadership in black communities came from the educated elite—ministers, professionals, teachers, etc.—who spoke for and on behalf of the laborers, maids, farmhands, and working poor who made up the bulk of the black population. Many of these traditional leaders were uneasy about involving ordinary blacks in mass activity such as boycotts and marches.

SCLC's belief that churches should be involved in political activism against social ills was also deeply controversial. Many ministers and religious leaders—both black and white—thought that the role of the church was to focus on the spiritual needs of the congregation and perform charitable works to aid the needy. To some of them, the social-political activity of King and SCLC amounted to dangerous radicalism which they strongly opposed.

Citizenship Schools

Originally started in 1954 by Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, the Citizenship Schools focused on teaching adults to read so they could pass the voter-registration literacy tests, fill out driver's license exams, use mail-order forms, and open checking accounts. Under the auspices of the Highlander Folk School (now Highlander Research and Education Center) the program was expanded across the South. The Johns Island Citizenship School was housed at The Progressive Club, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.

According to Septima Clark's autobiography, Echo In My Soul (page 225), the Highlander Folk School was closed because it engaged in commercial activities in violation its charter; Highlander Folk School was chartered by the State of Tennessee as a non-profit corporation without stockholders or owners. However, in 1961, the Highlander staff reincorporated as the Highlander Research and Education Center and moved to Knoxville. Under the innocuous cover of adult-literacy classes, the schools secretly taught democracy and civil rights, community leadership and organizing, practical politics, and the strategies and tactics of resistance and struggle, and in so doing built the human foundations of the mass community struggles to come.

Eventually, close to 69,000 teachers, most of them unpaid volunteers and many with little formal education taught Citizenship Schools throughout the South. Many of the Civil Rights Movement's adult leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Victoria Gray, and hundreds of other local leaders in black communities across the South attended and taught citizenship schools.

Under the leadership of Clark, the citizenship school project trained over 10,000 citizenship schoolteachers who led citizenship schools throughout the South, representing a popular education effort on a massive scale. On top of these 10,000 teachers, citizenship schools reached and taught more than 25,000 people. By 1968, over 700,000 African Americans became registered voters thanks to Clark's dedication to the movement.

As a result of the SCLC acquiring the already-established Citizenship Schools program, as its director, Clark became the first woman allowed a position on the SCLC board, despite continued resistance from the other (exclusively male) SCLC leaders. Andrew Young, who had joined Highlander the previous year to work with the Citizenship Schools, also joined the SCLC staff. The SCLC staff of citizenship schools were overwhelmingly women, as a result of the daily experience gained by becoming a teacher. Clark attested that deliberate and widespread discrimination and even overt suppression of women was "one of the greatest weaknesses of the civil rights movement."

Birmingham campaign

By contrast, the 1963 SCLC campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, was an unqualified success. The campaign focused on a single goal—the desegregation of Birmingham's downtown merchants—rather than total desegregation, as in Albany. The brutal response of local police, led by Public Safety Commissioner "Bull" Connor, stood in stark contrast to the nonviolent civil disobedience of the activists.

After his arrest in April, King wrote the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in response to a group of clergy who had criticized the Birmingham campaign, writing that it was "directed and led in part by outsiders" and that the demonstrations were "unwise and untimely." In his letter, King explained that, as president of SCLC, he had been asked to come to Birmingham by the local members:

King also addressed the question of "timeliness":