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Southern Negro Leaders Conference
In the fall of 1956, Bayard Rustin discussed with Martin Luther King, Jr., the need for an organization larger than the Montgomery Improvement Association that could sustain protest in the South. With contributions from civil rights activists Ella Baker and Stanley Levison, Rustin drafted seven working papers for a workshop on nonviolent social change. After studying the papers, King called a conference at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church in January 1957. There he discussed with more than sixty ministers their common problems of the Southern struggle. The group voted unanimously to form a permanent organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). |