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Saturday April 15th

SCLC BEGINNINGS
With the desegregation of the Montgomery bus system on December 20, 1956, the boycott was carried out by the newly established Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). Martin Luther King, Jr. served as President and Ralph David Abernathy served as Program Director. It was one of history’s most dramatic and massive nonviolent protests, stunning the nation and the world. The boycott was also a signal to Black America to begin a new phase of the long struggle, a phase that came to be known as the modern civil rights movement.

As bus boycotts spread across the South, leaders of the MIA and other protest groups met in Atlanta on January 10 – 11, 1957, to form a regional organization and coordinate protest activities across the South. Ralph David Abernathy – during the Atlanta meeting, along with 60 persons from 10 states – assembled announcing the founding of the Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration. They issued a document declaring that civil rights are Essential to democracy, that segregation must end and that all Black people should reject segregation absolutely and nonviolently