who founded the southern christian leadership conference in order to challenge racial segregation
Southern Christian Leadership Conference On January 10, 1957, following the Montgomery Bus Boycott victory and consultations with Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and others, Martin Luther King Jr. invited about 60 black ministers and leaders to Ebenezer Church in Atlanta. Prior to this, Rustin, in New York City, conceived the idea of initiating such an effort and first sought C. K. Steele to make the call and take the lead role. Steele declined, but told Rustin he would be glad to work right beside him if he sought King in Montgomery, for the role. Their goal was to form an organization to coordinate and support nonviolent direct action as a method of desegregating bus systems across the South. In addition to King, Rustin, Baker, and Steele, Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, Joseph Lowery of Mobile, and Ralph Abernathy of Montgomery, all played key roles in this meeting.[2]
Jim Crow laws Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. Enacted by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures in the late 19th century after the Reconstruction period, these laws continued to be enforced until 1965. They mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America, starting in the 1870s and 1880s, and upheld by the United States Supreme Court's "separate but equal" doctrine for African Americans. Public education had essentially been segregated since its establishment in most of the South after the Civil War. This principle was extended to public facilities and transportation, including segregated cars on interstate trains and, later, buses. Facilities for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to those which were then available to white Americans; sometimes they did not exist at all. This body of law institutionalized a number of economic, educational, and social disadvantages. Segregation by law existed mainly in the Southern states, while Northern segregation was generally a matter of factâ€”patterns of housing segregation enforced by private covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory labor union practices. "Jim Crow" was a pejorative expression referring to a minstrel song called "Jump Jim Crow" by a performer appearing in blackface.[1]