Southern Christian Leadership Conference

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was a U.S. civil rights organization founded in Atlanta in January 1957 following the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, with Martin Luther King Jr. as its president. The SCLC coordinated the major nonviolent direct action campaigns of the American civil rights movement through the 1960s, functioning as the organizational infrastructure through which King translated the Montgomery model into a national strategy for dismantling racial segregation.¹

Founding and Structure

The SCLC was organized at the First Negro Baptist Church in Atlanta on January 10-11, 1957, drawing together Black clergy from across the South who had participated in or supported the Montgomery Boycott. The founding meeting brought together approximately sixty ministers from twenty-nine communities in ten states.

The organization's structure was deliberately clerical: local chapters were organized through Black churches, which provided institutional stability, community trust, and the moral authority that secular organizations lacked. The church-based structure also provided a degree of legal protection and public legitimacy that made the organization harder to suppress than explicitly political formations. The SCLC served as an umbrella coordinating body; local affiliates maintained their own operations while coordinating major campaigns with national leadership.¹

Major Campaigns

The Birmingham Campaign (1963): The SCLC chose Birmingham as the site for a major direct action campaign in spring 1963 because of its extreme and visible enforcement of segregation under Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor. The "Project C" (for Confrontation) campaign, led by Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and SCLC organizer James Bevel, produced the visual imagery - fire hoses and police dogs turned on peaceful marchers including children - that generated the national and international pressure that led President Kennedy to commit to comprehensive civil rights legislation.

The March on Washington (August 28, 1963): The SCLC was a core organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, along with the NAACP, Urban League, CORE, and SNCC. The march drew approximately 250,000 people to the National Mall and was the occasion for King's "I Have a Dream" address.

The Selma-to-Montgomery Marches (1965): The SCLC organized the voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, which produced the Bloody Sunday violence of March 7, 1965 - when Alabama state troopers attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge - and generated the political pressure that produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965.¹

FBI Surveillance and COINTELPRO

The FBI under Director J. Edgar Hoover viewed the SCLC as a potential vehicle for communist influence and subjected the organization to extensive surveillance beginning in the late 1950s. SCLC's close advisor Stanley Levison - a New York attorney and businessman - had Communist Party connections that the FBI used as the basis for an initial wiretap authorization.

Under COINTELPRO, the FBI's program specifically targeted "Black nationalist hate groups" and the SCLC more broadly. The program included:

• Wiretapping of King's phones and hotel rooms
• Infiltration of SCLC chapters with informants
• Attempts to discredit King with mainstream civil rights organizations, newspapers, and government officials
• The anonymous letter sent to King in November 1964 suggesting he commit suicide before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony

The Church Committee found in 1975 that the FBI's COINTELPRO targeting of the SCLC and King was one of the most extreme abuses of the program and that no legitimate security justification existed for its scope.²

Post-King

Following King's assassination in April 1968, the SCLC continued under successive presidents including Abernathy, Joseph Lowery, and others. The organization remained active in civil rights advocacy but never recaptured the organizational coherence or moral authority it held during King's presidency. It continues to operate as an advocacy organization.