White Supremacy Birthed The Southern Christian Leadership Conference 63 Years Ago Today
Paying homage to the SCLC for 63 years fighting racial injustice.
By Danielle Buckingham
(BLACKSTEW) — On this day in Black history, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, following the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott. Sixty-three years ago, Martin Luther King Jr., who served as SCLC president up until his assassination, gathered a group of 60 community leaders and ministers to create an organization devoted to nonviolent resistance to racial injustice across the South.
The civil rights organization has been integral for kick-starting major protests that challenge white supremacy in citizens and racist instituions, and developing some of the most fearless Black leaders and activists such as Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ralph David Abernathy, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Fred Shuttlesworth and Joseph Lowery to name a few. Here are five notable contributions of the SCLC that has shaped the freedom fighting strategies of today.
Citizenship Education Program
One of SCLC’s missions was voter education through the CEP originally founded in 1954 as Citizenship Schools. This program not only encouraged civic engagement through education, but it created spaces for Grassroots organizing among community members. Today, there are numerous organizations, like Mississippi Votes, that followed in the footsteps of CEP in their dedication to mobilizing and educating Black southern voters.
St. Augustine Movement
In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other SCLC members went to St. Augustine, Florida, at the request of local activists facing intimidation and violence from white supremacists. SCLC helped lead multiple demonstrations, the most notable being a swim-in by white and black protestors at a local hotel. After the protestors jumped into a whites only pool, the hotel owner responded by pouring acid into the pool. This garnered national media attention, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 was passed the next day.
March Against Fear
In June 1966, James Meredith, the first Black man to integrate the University of Mississippi, began the March Against Fear. Meredith was shot on the second day. SCLC along with other prominent groups continued what became the largest civil rights demonstration in Mississippi’s history, and led to the registration of over 4,000 African Americans along the way.
Chicago Freedom Movement
On January 7, 1966, SCLC led the Chicago Freedom Movement to address racial segregarion and discrimination in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. The demonstrations born out of this movement resulted in Congress passing the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
The Poor People’s Campaign
Arguably, SCLC’s most powerful project, the Poor People’s Campaign, sought to form a multiracial coalition dedicated to poverty and economic justice. This endeavor made SCLC a target for COINTELPRO as a so-called Black nationalist hate group. The day after King’s final speech during the Memphis sanitation strike, he was assassinated outside Lorraine Hotel. Nonetheless, King and SCLC’s vision has endured the test of time, and is evident in the work of organizations such as the Southern Workers Assembly (SWA).
