The SCLC was formed right after the Montgomery bus boycott victory of 1957, as an organization to coordinate and support the already established tactic of nonviolent direct action to desegregate bus systems across the South. Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, C.K. Steele, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, Ralph Abernathy played key roles, with Martin Luther King, Jr. serving as its first president.
Many of the leading names of the Civil Rights Movement received training in nonviolent action, for the first time within an integrated setting, at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in the mid to late 1950s. Highlander was founded in 1932 to help organize workers and train rural and industrial leaders during the Great Depression.
In the early 60s, Ella Baker invited some of African American college students staging anti- segregation sit ins around the country to a meeting out of which was formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. SNCC practiced peaceful, direct action protests, while maintaining its autonomy from the SCLC and other groups. By 1967 SNCC leaders Kwame Ture (then known as Stokely Carmichael) and H. Rap Brown had departed from the original nonviolent mission, expelled its white members and formed a partnership with the Panther Party.
The fundamental tenets of what is now known as the Kingian philosophy of nonviolence were described in King’s first book, Stride Toward Freedom. These tenets were established to combat the “Triple Evils” of poverty, racism and militarism that exist as cyclical forms of violence, and stand as barriers to living in the “Beloved Community.”
To work against these evils one must first develop a nonviolent frame of mind as described in the Six Principles of Nonviolence.
