Southern Christian Leadership Conference
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The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), formerly known as the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration is a civil rights organization founded in January 1957.
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[edit] Origins
It was proposed by Bayard Rustin, and co-founded by Joseph Lowery, Ella Baker, T. J. Jemison and others. It was later headed by one of its founders, Martin Luther King Jr. The organization expressed these individuals' belief that a wider organization could be built upon the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, hence the original name.The organization focused on non-violent civil disobedience and believed that it could use that to gain the civil rights that African Americans lacked at the time.
[edit] Tactics
Boycotts, and sit-ins were popular forms of protest. Other forms of protest were also utilized. The SCLC also used non-violence as their main form of protest. Although many people were angry and many people wanted revenge, the SCLC always pressured people to remain nonviolent.
[edit] Members
The most well known Member of the SCLC was Martin Luther King Jr., who led the organization until he was assassinated on April 4th 1968. Other prominent members of the organization included Dr. Joseph Lowery,Ralph Abernathy, C.K. Steele, C.T. Vivian, Fred Shuttlesworth, Jesse Jackson, Golden Franks, Walter Faunteroy, Claude Young, Curtis W. Harris, and Andrew Young, and Peter Geffen. The current president of the SCLC is Charles Steele Jr.
[edit] Involvements
The SCLC was involved in many events during the Civil Rights Movement, including the Albany Movement between 1961 and 1962, the Birmingham, Alabama Campaign and the March on Washington in the Summer of 1963.
[edit] Relationships with other organizations
During the early 1960's, the group was considered more radical than the older NAACP and more conservative than the younger Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SCLC had a mentoring relationship with SNCC in its earlier years, before SNCC abandoned its exclusive policy of nonviolence.
Much thought went into the naming of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They wanted to attract attention from both African American and Caucasian American people, without mentioning the name of any race to distance themselves from other races. They decided on the name, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which didn't indicate any particular race, thus ensuring people across America could relate to it, even the most radical Southern whites. Southern could be related to by all people in the south of the USA, Christian could be related to all Christians across the USA, Leadership could relate to all leaders in the USA and Conference was used as a conference does not exclude anyone, which the word 'Organization' could have.
