Southern Christian Leadership Conference

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded in January 1957 in the wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, became the organizational backbone of the American civil rights movement. Led from its founding by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the SCLC was rooted in the tradition and institutional power of the Black church — using congregations, ministers, and the moral authority of Christian nonviolence to organize communities across the South and beyond. The SCLC’s campaigns were strategic and carefully planned. The Birmingham Campaign of 1963 — known internally as Project C for “Confrontation” — brought thousands of protesters into the streets of one of the most segregated cities in America. Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor’s decision to turn fire hoses and police dogs on peaceful demonstrators, many of them children, was broadcast into living rooms across the country and around the world. The images horrified the nation and generated irresistible pressure on President Kennedy to introduce landmark civil rights legislation. The SCLC collaborated with SNCC on the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965, which resulted in the nationally televised attack on marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge — known as Bloody Sunday — and ultimately in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, Ralph Abernathy led the organization and mounted the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. The SCLC remains active today, continuing to advocate for economic justice and civil rights.