Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), organization of black churches and ministers which, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., 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 nonconfrontational legal strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had yielded only slow change.

SCLC was closely associated with King, who believed that nonviolent civil disobedience could help to end segregation and foster social justice for blacks. King's charismatic personality dominated SCLC, but other activists also contributed to its success. They included Ralph Abernathy, who was King's closest associate and who was frequently jailed with King for acts of civil disobedience; Ella Baker, a longtime promoter of community-based civil rights activism in the South; Andrew Young, an SCLC leader who later became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta; and Jesse Jackson, a clergyman who led efforts to pressure Chicago businesses to hire more blacks in the mid-1960s and became a well-known civil rights activist in the 1970s and 1980s.

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.

The strategy did work, however, 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.

The momentum from the Birmingham protests culminated on August 28, 1963, with the March on Washington, which SCLC helped to organize. More than 200,000 people gathered in the U.S. capital to show their support for civil rights for blacks and to hear King speak. His speech, “I Have a Dream,” summarized his vision of the goals of the civil rights movement. The Birmingham and Washington, D.C., actions built support for national legislation against segregation, which led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations, as well as discrimination by employers, unions, or voting registrars.

On March 7, 1965, SCLC participated in a protest march that was planned to go from Selma, Alabama, more than 80 km (50 mi) to the state capital of Montgomery, with the goal of drawing national attention to the struggle for black voting rights in the state. State troopers and mounted police met more than 500 marchers just outside of Selma and told them to go home. When the marchers refused, the police launched a brutal attack, beating and tear-gassing protesters and sending more than 70 people to the hospital. Televised scenes of the violence on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday shocked viewers around the nation, prompting President Lyndon Johnson to deplore the violence and eliciting an outpouring of support to continue the Selma protests. SCLC petitioned a federal district judge for an order barring police from interfering with a renewed march to Montgomery. The judge, citing the “brutal mistreatment” of the protesters, approved SCLC's proposal. Two weeks after Bloody Sunday more than 3000 people, including a core of 300 marchers who would make the entire trip, set out toward Montgomery, where King addressed a rally of more than 20,000 people five days later.

The march created support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Johnson signed into law in August. The 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.

After the Selma march, SCLC's work yielded fewer successes. In 1965 King began to criticize American foreign policy in the Vietnam War (1959-1975), a position that cost the organization the support of President Johnson, as well as the backing of many other white Americans.

After 1965 SCLC began to broaden its civil rights agenda by focusing on issues related to black poverty, particularly in the North. King 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. Black Baptist ministers, who disagreed with many of SCLC's tactics, especially the confrontational act of sending black protesters into all-white neighborhoods, publicly opposed King's efforts. SCLC's protests did not lead to significant gains and were often met with violent counter-demonstrations by whites, including neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

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. As part of the campaign, King and other SCLC leaders frequently spoke out against economic discrimination. In the spring of 1968 King and other SCLC leaders went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking black garbage workers. King was assassinated there on April 4, by an escaped white convict, James Earl Ray.

Ralph Abernathy succeeded King as head of the SCLC and oversaw the Poor People's Campaign. SCLC 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 housing. But SCLC's broadened agenda for social change increased criticism by white officials. Abernathy also led SCLC in supporting striking hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1969. This campaign allied SCLC with labor unions and ultimately resulted in a victory for the workers.

After 1969, SCLC had trouble raising money and was forced to cut its staff. Accustomed to following King's lead, the staff often failed to agree about goals and tactics. Young left SCLC in 1970 and Jackson resigned in 1971. The organization survived, however, and its leaders continued to oppose racial injustice and advocate greater economic opportunity for the poor.

Joseph E. Lowery became SCLC president in 1977 and led the organization in battling efforts by the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) to limit civil rights legislation. SCLC's opposition to Reagan Administration policy in Central America induced the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to begin surveillance of SCLC—along with more than 100 other civil rights, labor, and religious groups—for “alleged criminal activity.” Lowery also led SCLC's support for efforts to help end the racial segregation known as apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s. Lowery resigned as president in 1998, and he was succeeded by Martin Luther King, III.