Southern Christian Leadership Conference

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The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an American civil rights organization. It played a prominent role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. SCLC was closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King, Jr. The SCLC had a large role in the American Civil Rights Movement.

Origins

The origins of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference lie in the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat on a bus to a white man. The bus boycott, which lasted from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, brought together two Montgomery ministers: Ralph David Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as other Montgomery civil rights activists, and supporters from across the South.

As campaigns to desegregate buses began to spread in the South, a group of 60 activists met in Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 1957 to discuss the use of nonviolent resistance as the guiding principle for such movements. In addition to King and Abernathy, the conference attracted such civil rights activists as Ella Baker, T. J. Jemison, Stanley Levison, Joseph Lowery, Bayard Rustin, Fred Shuttlesworth, C. K. Steele, and others.

At the meeting, the group established the Negro Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration, which was soon renamed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As its name suggested, the organization intended to draw its strength from leaders of the Black Church in the South.

Originally, SCLC was composed of affiliated churches and some community organizations such as the Montgomery Improvement Association and Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, rather than individual members. In recent years SCLC has begun recruiting individual and corporate memberships. In the 1950s, SCLC's organizational role was initially seen as a central clearinghouse for information and marshalling support local civil rights struggles by SCLC affiliates. By the early 1960s, SCLC began to offer direct organizational support to affiliates and conduct major campaigns in cooperation with affiliates.

Tactics

Since its establishment, SCLC has been committed to the use of nonviolent civil disobedience combined with education as a means of securing equal rights for African Americans. In recent years the organization's focus has expanded to include human rights movements around the world.

Campaigns and Projects

During its first few years, SCLC activities were focused primarily on education, voter registration, and support for local struggles being waged by SCLC affiliates. SCLC and Dr. King were sometimes criticized for lack of militancy by younger activists in groups such as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who were participating in sit-ins and Freedom Rides.

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.

When the state of Tennessee revoked Highlander's charter and confiscated its land and property in 1961, SCLC rescued the citizenship school program and added Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson, and Andrew Young to its staff. Under the innocuous cover of adult-literacy classes, the schools secretly taught democracy and civil rights, community leadership and organizing, practical politicals, and the strategies and tactics of resistance and struggle, and in so doing built the human foundations of the mass community struggles to come. Many of the Civil Rights Movement 's adult leaders such as Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, and hundreds of other local leaders in black communities across the South attended and taught citizenship schools.

Albany Movement

In 1961 and 1962, SCLC joined SNCC in the Albany Movement, a broad protest against segregation in Albany, Georgia. It is generally considered the organization's first major nonviolent campaign. At the time, it was considered by many to be unsuccessful: despite large demonstrations and many arrests, few changes were won, and the protests drew little national attention. Yet, despite the lack of immediate gains, much of the success of the subsequent Birmingham Campaign can be attributed to lessons learned in Albany.

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:

I think I should indicate why I am here In Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. ... Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here I am here because I have organizational ties here.

King also addressed the question of "timeliness":

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. ... Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.

The most dramatic moments of the Birmingham campaign came on 2 May, when more than 1,000 Black children left school to join the demonstrations; hundreds were arrested. The following day, 2,500 more students joined and were met by Bull Connor with police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses. That evening, television news programs reported to the the nation and the world scenes of fire hoses knocking down schoolchildren and dogs attacking individual demonstrators. Public outrage led the Kennedy administration to intervene more forcefully and a settlement was announced on 10 May, under which the downtown businesses would desegregate and eliminate discriminatory hiring practices, and the city would release the jailed protesters.

March on Washington

After the Birmingham Campaign, SCLC called for massive protests in Washington DC to push for new civil rights legislation that would outlaw segregation nation-wide. A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin issued similar calls for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On July 2nd, 1963, King, Randolph, and Rustin met with Jim Farmer of CORE, John Lewis of SNCC, Roy Wilkens of the NAACP, and Whitney Young of the Urban League to plan a united march on August 28.

The media and political establishment viewed the march with great fear and trepidation over the possibility that protesters would run riot in the streets of the capitol. But their fears, the March on Washington was a huge success, with no violence, and an estimated number of participants ranging from 200,000 to 300,000. It was also a logistical triumph — more than 2,000 buses, 21 special trains, 10 chartered aircraft, and uncounted autos converged on the city in the morning and departed without difficulty by nightfall.

The crowning moment of the march was Dr. King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech in which he articulated the hopes and aspirations of the Civil Rights Movement and rooted it in two cherished gospels — the Old Testament and the unfulfilled promise of the American creed.

St. Augustine Protests

When civil rights activists protesting segregation in St. Augustine, Florida were met with arrests and Ku Klux Klan violence, the local SCLC affiliate appealed to Dr. King for assistance in the spring of 1964. SCLC sent staff to help organize and lead demonstrations and mobilized support for St. Augustine in the North. Hundreds were arrested on sit-ins and marches opposing segregation, so many that the jails were filled and the overflow prisoners had to be held in outdoor stockades. Among the northern supporters who endured arrest and incarceration were Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, the mother of the governor of Massachusetts and Mrs. John Burgess, wife of the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts.

Nightly marches to the Old Slave Market were attacked by white mobs, and when blacks attempted to integrate "white-only" beachs they were assaulted by police who beat them with clubs. On June 11, Dr. King and other SCLC leaders were arrested for trying to lunch at the Monson Motel restaurant, and when an integrated group of young protesters tried to use the motel swimming pool the owner poured acid into the water. TV and newspaper stories of the struggle for justice in St. Augustine helped build public support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that was then being debated in Congress.

Selma Voting Rights Campaign and March to Montgomery

Grenada Mississippi Movement

Chicago Freedom Movement

Poor People's Campaign

Relationships with other organizations

During the early 1960s, the group was considered more radical than the older NAACP and more conservative than the younger Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. To a certain extent in the period 1960-164, SCLC had a mentoring relationship with SNCC before SNCC began moving away from nonviolence and integration in the late 1960s.

Leadership

The best-known member of the SCLC was Martin Luther King, who led the organization until he was assassinated on April 4th 1968. Other prominent members of the organization have included Joseph Lowery, Ralph Abernathy, Ella Baker, Jesse Jackson, James Orange, Charles Kenzie Steele, C.T. Vivian, Fred Shuttlesworth, Walter E. Fauntroy, Claude Young, Al Sharpton, Curtis W. Harris, Hosea Williams, Maya Angelou, and Andrew Young.Presidents

1957-1968	Martin Luther King, Jr.
1968-1977	Ralph Abernathy
1977-1997	Joseph Lowery
1997-2004	Martin Luther King III
2004	Fred Shuttlesworth
2004-present	Charles Kenzie Steele, Jr.

References

Notes

External links

• The SCLC Official Website
• Civil Rights Movement Veterans

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Last updated on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 16:39:18 PDT (GMT -0700)
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