The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) (first known as Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration) is a civil rights organization founded in January 1957. Proposed by Bayard Rustin and later headed by Martin Luther King Jr, the organization expressed these individuals' belief that a wider organization could be built upon the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, hence the original name. The organization focused on non-violent civil disobedience and believed that it could use that to gain the civil rights that African Americans lacked at the time. Other prominent members of the organization included Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young. During the early 1960's, the group was considered more radical than the older NAACP and more conservative than the younger Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SCLC had a mentoring relationship with SNCC in its earlier years, before SNCC abandoned its exclusive policy of nonviolence.

External links

• Southern Christian Leadership Conference
  
• SCLC Magazine