Short answer question

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was conceived when Martin Luther King Jr. invited several leading civil rights leaders (and emerging religious figures in the black community) on January 10, 1957, to King’s Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, Georgia. King called this meeting following the victorious Montgomery Bus Boycott that garnered national attention. King brought in allies such as Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, Joseph Lowery, Ralph Abernathy, and C.K. Steele. All of these men would have some involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in the decade ahead. The goal of this meeting was to form an organization to coordinate and conduct nonviolent action as a method of desegregating bus systems across the entirety of the South.
Within a month, the groups officially formed as the SCLC and decided to expand its focus beyond buses to ending all forms of segregation. MLK Jr. was tapped to lead this group.
SCLC was established as an organization of affiliates, most of which were either individual churches or community organizations. Approaching this topic from a Christian and nonviolent perspective was the overarching method utilized by the SCLC. This organization was different from but comprised a significant portion of the large group of civil rights groups that gained traction throughout the 1960s. Alongside SCLC, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC: pronounced “snick” by those in the know :), and the Freedom Riders all acted as a powerful front to the racial conditions of the day in 1960s America.

QUESTIONS TO GO WITH THE READING
What do you think the differences between civil rights movement groups meant to those in the movement at the time? What did so many groups working for the same ends mean to Americans in the 1960s? What are your thoughts on appeals to Christianity that civil rights activists made?