Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

One of the most effective and controversial of the African American civil rights organizations of the 1960’s. It waged a nonviolent campaign that led to the passage of legislation for the abolition of racial segregation in the South.

Origins and History

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was created in 1957 in the wake of the successful Montgomery bus boycott from which the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as a national leader. Organized through a series of conferences in Atlanta, Georgia, and New Orleans, Louisiana, SCLC brought Northern liberals and left-oriented activists such as Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison together with church-based black civil rights advocates in the Deep South. SCLC remained a church-centered organization made up of local and state groups affiliated by charter, with an all-black board of directors mostly from the Deep South. Sponsorship from within the African American church gave SCLC a distinctive character and helped generate a broad popular following, particularly in those communities where SCLC’s successes were of the greatest consequence.

Activities

The Civil Rights movement was already well under way in 1960 when student-led sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, led to a mass mobilization of African American youth across the South in protest against segregation. SCLC’s King helped create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and a partnership soon developed between the two organizations. By the 1960’s, King had become SCLC’s first president and a dominant influence, employing the assistance of a trained and disciplined staff of advisers, field directors, organizers, and fund-raisers. King and SCLC rejected the interracialism of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the legal strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), preferring direct-action protest; nevertheless, the SCLC cooperated closely with other civil rights organizations throughout the critical years from 1961 to 1965. Early successes for SCLC were modest, however, with failure at Albany, Georgia, caused by white resistance and black community divisions. SCLC’s strategy at this time featured a nonpartisan appeal for the creation of a spiritual, nonviolent army that would promote civil disobedience in order to challenge racial prejudice and discriminatory laws. Operating through a mixture of Christian social gospel, the teachings of India’s Mohandas Gandhi, and the pragmatic opportunism of U.S. democracy, King and SCLC proclaimed their mission to redeem the soul of the nation.

In Birmingham, Alabama, through the spring and summer of 1963, SCLC experienced its most dramatic and compelling success by focusing national attention on violent white resistance to desegregation. Its strategy included a calculated effort to engage federal support, leading to the March on Washington in August, which involved SNCC, NAACP, CORE, and a number of other civil rights groups. In the fall, a national consensus in support of civil rights objectives gained strength after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, whose administration had become cautiously allied with SCLC and its leadership.

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, SCLC shifted its focus to voting rights and was joined by SNCC and other civil rights groups in a campaign that targeted the most hostile areas of the Deep South. Unsuccessful efforts at St. Augustine, Florida, coincided with mounting friction between SCLC and other organizations such as SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP over issues of funding, strategy, and leadership. However, during the first three months of 1965, protests in Alabama culminated in a march from Selma to Montgomery that successfully dramatized the plight of African Americans denied the right to vote, resulting in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

SCLC had never enjoyed complete stability, but as early as 1964, the organization suffered a financial setback with the expiration of the Gandhi Society, a fund-raising subsidiary. With the loss of top-level staff members, such as executive director Wyatt T. Walker, SCLC spun into confusion spawned by internal schisms and external political pressures. Only King’s highly public profile, unique personality, and forceful mediation enabled the top staff members, many of whom possessed large egos and volcanic tempers, to work together successfully through 1965 and 1966. In 1965, SCLC reached a peak staff membership of more than two hundred people, with an income of $1.5 million, supported by contributions drawn from diverse sources throughout the nation, including community church groups, the business world, organized labor, and major foundations. After the summer of 1965, a new strategic shift within SCLC resulted in an emphasis on economic issues such as jobs, housing, and the mounting crisis in the nation’s inner cities, and many civil rights advocates became involved in opposition to the Vietnam War. Relations with other organizations, particularly SNCC, continued to deteriorate, and King became the target of special Federal Bureau of Investigation covert intelligence operations designed to discredit him and disrupt the SCLC’s activities. The mood among top staff members became increasingly pessimistic as the popular response to urban rioting and antiwar protests provided signs that the United States was becoming more divided and hostile toward civil rights activism.

In the early 1960’s, SCLC had derived organizational strength from Deep South civil rights centers that grew out of the African American church. However, by 1966, when SCLC launched its attempt to combat segregation in Chicago, the organization had begun to suffer from weak management, factional rivalries, and a deteriorating financial condition with expenses exceeding revenues. By the end of the year, it was clear that Chicago remained impervious to SCLC tactics, while black nationalism, with its rhetoric of confrontation, and the Black Power movement emerged as explosive forces among African Americans.

In 1966, SCLC became politically isolated because of an altered atmosphere within national politics, deeper splits among civil rights organizations, and King’s criticism of the war in Vietnam. Although SCLC had often worked effectively with SNCC, attempts to dominate the student wing of the movement helped to alienate key leaders, driving them more swiftly in the direction of a militant black nationalism. As overall support for nonviolent spiritualism in response to white resistance began to fade through the mid-1960’s, organizational weaknesses within SCLC found preachers pitted against intellectuals for staff leadership, with board members going as far as to oppose King because of his support for antiwar protests. By 1966, all the major civil rights organizations, including SCLC, were enjoying less popular support, and SCLC saw continuing staff departures and top leaders becoming demoralized and cynical. Convinced that the Vietnam War presented the primary stumbling block to successful social action, a deeply distressed and disillusioned King turned to economic radicalism and black power, questioning every aspect of his leadership through the final months leading up to his assassination in the spring of 1968. Already beset with declining contributions and shattered staff morale because of the failed campaign in Chicago, SCLC was nevertheless able to restore staff discipline and financial stability by the time of King’s death in Memphis and the early stages of the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington.

Impact

Probably the most influential of the 1960’s civil rights organizations, SCLC was a vital force in the making of national policy from 1961 to 1965, when major civil rights reforms were enacted by Congress with the backing of the president and the courts. Although later civil rights legislation was far less effective, southern states saw the gradual curtailment of racial segregation, the growth of an African American voter constituency, a dramatic increase in African American elected officials, and the overall end of institutionalized white supremacy. King and SCLC, meanwhile, became national symbols of the American aspiration for a society free of racial discrimination.

Subsequent Events

After King’s assassination, SCLC leadership was in the hands of Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and other nationally recognized figures. Campaigns focusing on public school integration continued to operate into the early 1970’s when the organization splintered. Jackson broke from SCLC in late 1971 to create his own organization, People United to Serve Humanity. In 1972, former SCLC executive director Young became the first African American since Reconstruction to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for the state of Georgia. Although SCLC continued under the presidency of Abernathy up to 1977 and Joseph E. Lowery through the 1980’s, the organization lacked the resources, the national constituency, and the high public profile to sustain the 1960’s style of protest.

Additional Information

In-depth studies of SCLC are featured in David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986) and Adam Fairclough’s To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1987) and Thomas R. Peake’s Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the 1980’s (1987).