King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.), an organization formed to provide new leadership for the burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization emerged from Christianity while its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, Luther Jnr. traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, giving lectures on nonviolent protest and civil rights as well as meeting with religious figures, activists and political leaders.

During a month-long trip to India in 1959, he had the opportunity to meet family members and followers of Gandhi, the man he described in his autobiography as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.” He also authored five books and wrote articles during this time.

In 1960 Martin Luther Jnr. and his family moved to Atlanta, his native city, where he joined his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. This new position did not stop him and his S.C.L.C. colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most significant civil rights battles of the 1960s. Their philosophy of nonviolence was put to a particularly severe test during the Birmingham campaign of 1963, in which activists used a boycott, sit-ins and marches to protest segregation, unfair hiring practices and other injustices in one of America’s most racially divided cities.

Arrested for his involvement on April 12, Martin Luther King Jnr. penned the civil rights manifesto known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” an eloquent defense of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had criticized his tactics.