The SCLC’s purpose was to encourage people that segregation must end and that civil rights were crucial to democracy. Their ultimate belief was that all African Americans should continue to reject segregation absolutely and nonviolently. The SCLC especially stressed their belief to black college students, and helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The group’s beliefs also helped them make organization-wide decisions. During one of the conferences of the (soon to be called) SCLC, southerners and northerners alike believed that including the word “Christian” in their title would be appropriate in order to attract as many church leaders and average citizens as possible. They also agreed that adding the word to their title would secure the organization’s focus to a regional level. In addition, during the founding of the SCLC, choosing a headquarters was influenced by their beliefs. The city of Atlanta, Georgia was chosen, due to its large population of financially secure middle-class blacks, and accumulation of black college students, that could be persuaded.
The founding of the SCLC organization took place in Atlanta, GA, a few days after the Montgomery Bus Boycott ended (January 10-11, 1957). During this time, leaders of multiple civil rights protest groups, which consisted of 60 people from 10 states, assembled and announced the founding of the Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration. The organization's following meeting took place on February 14, a month after its founding, and was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, where an Executive Board of Directors, and elected officers, was established. Additionally, at this meeting the organization's name was shortened to Southern Leadership Conference. The SCLC, at its first convention, adopted its current name. This meeting occurred the following August, in Montgomery. There, their main strategy, protesting in a nonviolent mass, was acquired, in addition to their establishment of affiliation with other civil rights organizations across the South.
Within the SCLC, there were many southerners, more specifically, Georgians, who contributed to the organization’s success. From the beginning, Martin Luther King Jr. was the elected leader of the SCLC. Many historians find his leadership of the group contributed a large portion of the organization’s success in its early efforts. In addition to the appointment of MLK’s leadership, the SCLC, as suggested above, also had an elected board of directors. Although they did have a subtle form of royalty, the organization ultimately had a community-based lead.
The SCLC began their legacy by participating in activism during the Freedom Rides, an act of protest that came a few years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott (in 1961) which demanded desegregation on interstate buses. Later, in 1963 and 1964, the SCLC joined other civil rights organizations in a major project designed to register rural black Mississippians to vote. They were best known for their attempts to combat segregation and lack of voting rights of blacks, which they did by centering the public’s attention on the unfair Jim Crow laws. One of the SCLC’s campaigns, in Birmingham, resulted in police violence, and, because of the public’s outrage, put pressure on JFK to advance civil rights. Because of this, Kennedy sent a bill to congress that later became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The next year, King and the SCLC their campaign for voting rights, this time in Selma, which contributed to the acceptance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, King and the SCLC worked to win housing desegregation and jobs for blacks in Chicago, and to organize a Poor People's March in Washington, D.C., in April 1968.
Around the passage of the Voting Rights Act came the SCLC’s downfall. Younger blacks increasingly became opposed to the SCLC’s non-aggressive tactics and willingness to compromise with unpersuaded whites. In addition to the loss of support from them, King’s opposition to the Vietnam war cost the SCLC support of President Johnson and many wealthy white liberals across the nation. Thus, their funding was largely lessened. Unfortunately, 1968 was also the year King died, and the loss of his leadership alone had a massive impact on the SCLC’s downfall.
Today the SCLC is committed to upholding Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy, by addressing the unfortunate realities of poverty, racism, and militarism. According to their magazine, the SCLC is planning to launch Operation Out Think, which will bring together lead vocalizers throughout the nation to address these issues and related. The SCLC T.O.D.A.Y. is a SCLC founded “change agent” for the 21st century’s social and economic equality.