Martin Luther King, Jr. - Civil Rights, SCLC, Nonviolence: Recognizing the need for a mass movement to capitalize on the successful Montgomery action, King set about organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which gave him a base of operation throughout the South, as well as a national platform from which to speak.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and others, founded the SCLC in order to have a regional organization that could better coordinate civil rights protest activities across the South.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an African-American civil rights organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. SCLC is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had a large role in the American civil rights movement.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), nonsectarian American agency with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, established by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists in 1957 to coordinate and assist local organizations working for the full equality of African Americans in all aspects of American life.