The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Civil Rights Movement

Running head: AMERICAN HISTORY
AMERICAN HISTORY
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Author Note

1AMERICAN HISTORY
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference or popularly known as the SCLC is an
organization that dealt with the civil rights and the wellbeing of the African American
community of the United States of America. The community had an immense dedication towards
nonviolent and direct-action protests. Considered a radical organization, they mainly took actions
related to civil disobedience and boycotts towards injustice that was used upon the Black
Americans. During the 1950s there were many rules regarding the segregation of the Black and
the White communities of the Southern States like Montgomery and Alabama (Ling, 2015). The
Black Americans were confined to used separate school, separate transport, separate water
fountains. However it was a counter effect when Rosa Parks, one of the most popular names of
Civil Rights Activist Movement did not surrender her bus seat to one of the White American
passengers and thus that lead to her arrest. This result started a massive outrage in the Black
American community and not just in the state of Montgomery but across the South. This
triggered the attention of Martin Luther King Jr. and he and the other leaders of the civil rights
movement made a plan to boycott the entire transport of the state of Montgomery. This massive
nonviolent counterattack continued for over 350 days as the Black community refused the bus
transport that started economical problems in the bus companies.
After the success of the Montgomery Bus Incident, many representatives from more than
10 different states of the South met in Atlanta, Georgia with collective ideas and ideologies to
create a new organization to continue their struggle for a betterment of the Black society. This
organization was named The Southern Christian Leadership Conference along with Martin
Luther King Jr. being its first president (Tkaczynski, Arli, & Hussey, 2017). The goals of the
organization was to end all segregation towards the Black society, to provide civil right to all the
citizens of the United States and all the change should be done trough non-violent measures. By