The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was formed in January 1957 to to develop ways in which the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling desegregating bus systems in the South could be tested. With the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King as its leader, SCLC became the one of the most prominent and important organizations of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s objectives were to use nonviolent protest as a method of resistance to discrimination and to appeal to the moral conscience of white America.