The Southern Christian Leadership Conference
After the Montgomery Bus Boycott King's course was set.
He was an activist before a scholar; he knew his tactics and his
goals. Not until 1963 would he and his followers win another major
victory, however, and the late 1950s were a time of preparation,
misfires, partial victories, and many lessons.
In early January 1957 the leaders behind the Montgomery
Bus Boycott assembled in Atlanta, Georgia, and founded the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, or SCLC. The SCLC comprised churches and
clergy from across the South, and was created to coordinate protests
inspired by the success of the bus boycott. As its president the
SCLC elected King, for he had had played a large part in its creation,
and had, from the beginning, embodied the outlook and intellectual
spirit of the group. He did much of the SCLC's fundraising by
preaching and speaking in the North as well as South.
Although the SCLC was an explicitly Christian organization, King
had been encouraged to form it by Bayard Rustin, an activist with
communist sympathies who had helped with the effort in Montgomery.
Rustin was one of a few non-clergy activists who affected King's
career. He, along with white Jewish radical Stanley Levison (also
of communist affiliations), and black social activist Ella Barker,
who had worked extensively with the NAACP in the 1940s, guided
King's career, helping him organize events and write letters, speeches,
and books. King's association with Levison, which strengthened
early in 1957, drew the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, director
of the FBI under President Eisenhower. The FBI monitored and even
harassed King from this point on, at times attempting to sabotage
his public actions through blackmail. It is probable that King
had affairs, and the FBI's claim to know of these increased their
power over him.
In February of 1957 the SCLC sent a message to Eisenhower, drafted
by Levison and Rustin, requesting that the White House hold a conference
on civil rights. It was ignored by Eisenhower, but caught the
attention of the mass media. Time magazine featured King
on its cover, reinforcing the fame brought him by the bus boycott.
King's prominence also landed him an invitation to celebrations
of the independence of the African nation of Ghana from British
colonial rule, an invitation King accepted.
In May, King again made a national appearance, speaking
at a rally of almost forty thousand people in front of the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington, D.C. The occasion marked the third anniversary
of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling and
examined its limited practical effects. Late in 1957 King launched
through the SCLC the "Crusade for Citizenship," a program intended
to help register two million black voters in time for the 1960
presidential election. The campaign was over-ambitious, and its
failure made clear to the SCLC that cooperation with other black
civil rights groups was imperative for success.
Major events of this period of King's life outside the
SCLC included the birth of his and Coretta's second child, Martin
Luther King III, on 23 October, 1957, and King's writing and publication of Stride
Toward Freedom (1958), an account of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott. The book sold well, and inspired other African Americans
to action. King promoted the book during his speaking engagements,
which continued. At a book-signing in Harlem, he was stabbed by
a mentally ill black woman, and survived only because the weapon–a
letter opener- -slid between his heart and one of his lungs. As
part of his convalescence, King took a trip to India in February
1959, where he furthered his knowledge of non-violent tactics at
the Gandhi Peace Foundation.
When he returned from India, King began to commit himself more
fully to the SCLC. He admitted that the Crusade for Citizenship
had been a failure, and left his church in Montgomery to move back
to Atlanta (SCLC headquarters) at the end of 1959. There he resumed
his position of assistant pastor under his father at Ebenezer Church,
which freed him from the responsibilities of a full-time minister.
The move was well timed, as that winter there occurred
a spontaneous campaign of sit-ins, which began at a whites-only
lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and which spread to
scores of Southern cities. African American college students,
tired of segregated public facilities, protested with their peaceful
presences. The campaign clearly was inspired by tactics associated
with King, and the SCLC became directly involved in April, when
Ella Baker helped organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Later that year, King himself participated in sit-ins
in an Atlanta department store, and was arrested. Despite his
support and defense of the student actions, some of the protestors
disassociated themselves from King, claiming that he was more talk
than act, and furthermore, that he took the credit, in terms of
money and fame, that others earned through sacrifice. This impression
only deepened when King, through the help of presidential candidate
John F. Kennedy, left the Atlanta jail early. Among the more strident
members of SNCC, one's time in jail measured one's devotion to
the cause. And the fact that Kennedy agreed to help King was a
testament to King's rather mainstream appeal, for Kennedy needed
the votes of white Southerners; many blacks now felt that if King
could appeal to these white voters, he was not representing them
truly.
Versions of this criticism–that King compromised with
whites, and used his prominence to exempt himself from the tests
of dedicationfollowed him throughout his career. King, however,
seemed always to consider how he could best serve the movement,
and rightly believed that he could be most effective out of jail.
King attracted further criticism for what, by this time, was his
strict adherence to principles of absolute pacifism, a course not
popular with some members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, despite the name of their organization.
