Legacy

We are the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a national civil rights organization rooted in the Black church and the Christian tradition of nonviolence. We emerged directly from the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and were formally organized in 1957, when ministers and civil rights leaders gathered in Atlanta and at New Zion Baptist Church in New Orleans to coordinate a regional response to segregation across the South. Dr Martin Luther King Jr became our first president, working with leaders such as Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Septima Clark, and Bayard Rustin to build an organization devoted to redeeming the soul of America and advancing the vision of the Beloved Community.

During the classic civil rights era, we were at the forefront of some of the most significant campaigns in American history. We were central to the Birmingham Movement, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery campaign, and other nonviolent direct action efforts that confronted segregation, racism, and voter suppression. We helped convene and support the student sit in leaders whose work grew into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, seeding a new generation of movement leadership even as we continued our own campaigns. Through citizenship schools, voter registration drives, and organized nonviolence training, we equipped everyday people to stand up, speak out, and transform their communities. As President Mr. DeMark Liggins, Sr., is often quoted, “It is impossible to write the story of civil rights in America without using the ink of the SCLC and our leadership.”

Across the decades that followed, we continued to address the unfinished work of justice. We played a leading role in the movements that helped secure the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and later the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act, pressing the case that civil rights must be matched by economic rights and real opportunity. Under the leaders who succeeded Dr King, we took up issues such as voting access, policing, economic inequality, and the ongoing struggle against racism and poverty, while maintaining our identity as a faith centered, movement building institution.

Today, we remain headquartered in Atlanta and serve communities across the United States. Mr. DeMark Liggins, Sr., serves as our President and Chief Executive Officer, advancing the organization under the pillars of Legacy, Leadership, and Love. Legacy honors the founding vision of Dr King and the mothers and fathers of the movement by remembering and teaching the true history of the struggle. Leadership focuses on developing new generations of committed, principled leaders in congregations, campuses, and communities. Love is expressed through our programs that meet people at the point of their need, defend human dignity, and call the nation back to its deepest values.

Under the current administration, we are renewing and expanding our work through initiatives such as Generation NOW for emerging leaders, Christian Lead and Interfaith engagement, re MEMBER the Movement weekends that lift up local civil rights history, SCLC VOTES and other democracy and civic education efforts, economic development projects that connect Black communities with global opportunity, and ongoing nonviolence training. These examples are exemplary, not exhaustive. We continue to support and develop additional programs and initiatives that grow out of local needs and national priorities. All of this work is designed to respond to present day challenges in voting rights, economic access, education, and public policy while remaining faithful to the spiritual and strategic foundations laid in 1957.

As we continue our leadership today, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference remains guided by our tenets of Legacy, Leadership, and Love. We know that the fight for equity and justice is not a closed chapter of history but a continuing movement that we are proud to continue to take the lead in. We remain grounded in faith, committed to nonviolence, and call on moral people of conscience to work with us as we build the Beloved Community.