In an attempt to expand its global brand — and possibly open chapters in Germany and Russia — members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference traveled to Berlin earlier this month, where they convinced former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to chair the organization’s international initiative on peace and nonviolence.
It was the fourth trip to Germany this year for SCLC President Charles Steele, who said he is carrying out the mission of the organization's founder, Martin Luther King Jr., "to nationalize and institutionalize the SCLC."
The goal, he said, is to train people in the “Kingian philosophy of nonviolence” while recognizing that global problems can have an impact at home.
But while the SCLC is trying to conquer the world, some are questioning its domestic role.
The organization launched in 1957 by King, Ralph David Abernathy, Joseph Lowery and other civil rights giants who espoused nonviolent activism in the South is now housed in a relatively new $3 million red brick headquarters in the heart of Auburn Avenue. But its presence has been minimal on national and even local issues.
In Atlanta, for example, nobody from the national SCLC office participated in last year’s massive rally on the steps of the federal building in support of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager killed in 2012 by a neighborhood watchman who was eventually found not guilty of murder. And last week, the SCLC did not send a representative to a major regional meeting to prepare for potential protests over the decision not to indict a white police officer for the fatal shooting in August of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri.
“I think the SCLC is trying to find a voice,” said F. Carl Walton, an associate professor of political science at Savannah State University. “Because of what the SCLC was, philosophically a direct action organization, the question now is whether that is still effective for them.”
Markel Hutchins, an Atlanta-based civil rights advocate who once ran for SCLC president, said the group “for the last decade at least” seems to have struggled with an identity crisis. “When you have issues that are pressing domestically — like Michael Brown in Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, high unemployment, inadequate health care, a disastrous election for black and brown people — the SCLC not being a major presence in any of those issues is an aberration of what the SCLC has traditionally been about: redeeming the soul of America.”
Bernard Lafayette, chairman of the SCLC board, said the organization has been doing plenty in the United States and the South. He said he has been to Ferguson several times to conduct nonviolence training.
“I didn’t go for a press conference or to make a speech. I went to avoid an outbreak of violence and to prevent more people from getting killed,” Lafayette said. “We have to get our country to work on all levels. That is why I am in Ferguson, and Steele is in Germany.”
Steele expounded on that theme, saying: “Education and entrepreneurism are on our domestic agenda. Nonviolence and peace are on our global agenda. They both feed off each other. It is an integrated process.”
At the end of its press releases, in the section that describes the organization, an addendum now states that the SCLC's "sphere of influence and interests has become international in scope because the human rights movement transcends national boundaries."
Walton, who wrote a chapter about the SCLC in the anthology “Black Political Organizations in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” said “Steele is probably trying to reinvent the organization in some way.”
Walton’s research, “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference: Beyond the Civil Rights Movement,” looked at the organization’s leadership from King to Abernathy to Lowery to Martin Luther King III.
“Even as the SCLC evolved, it was a personality-centered organization around its leaders up to Lowery,” Walton said. “The broader question now is whether personality-driven organizations can still be effective. That is Steele’s challenge.”
The SCLC has outlasted such 1960s’ contemporaries as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). But it has been eclipsed by social activism organizations founded in later decades, such as Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.
So a global footprint might help. But the SCLC should first re-establish a strong local base, Hutchins said.
“If there are places in the world that need the SCLC’s mission it is the Southern states. Look at Georgia, with its inadequate education and hundreds of thousands of unregistered voters. Those are SCLC issues,” Hutchins said.
But Lafayette said the seeds of the organization’s global mission were planted by King himself, who traveled abroad extensively. One of the SCLC’s trips to Berlin this year was to mark the 50th anniversary of a King speech there.
“He didn’t confine himself to local issues,” Lafayette said. “He always wanted to make people aware that nonviolence was important in dealing with conflict in any situation, whether domestic or abroad. That is why he took a stand against the war in Vietnam. We are simply fulfilling this part of his mission.”
Yet troubling to some critics of the SCLC's direction is where the organization is trying to plant flags overseas. Aside from Germany and Russia, Steele has been working to create an SCLC presence in Italy and France. Observers ask: Why Europe rather than hot spots in Africa, the Middle East and South America?
“It seems to me that if they were interested in expanding globally, they would look to places like Brazil, West Africa and East Africa, where people of African descent are struggling with human rights issues,” Hutchins said.
Damien Conners, a former SCLC executive director, agreed. “Work needs to be done in reaching into places like Nigeria and South America, where there are deep economic disparities.”
But Lafayette said the work the SCLC is trying to do now should have long been on the agenda. Lafayette himself is renowned in conflict resolution — including in Nigeria, where he trained 27,000 ex-militants in the Niger Delta on nonviolence — and he has toured the world setting up programs that address nonviolence.
He said he has now brought that program directly to the SCLC “to fulfill Martin Luther King’s work.”
“… We live in a global community,” Lafayette said. “We cannot divide ourselves with what is happening in the ghetto and what is happening in the Ukraine.”
As Lafayette’s individual efforts continue, Steele said the SCLC will eventually work to establish bases in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. “But we have to start someplace,” Steele said.
As for the 83-year-old Gorbachev, the extent of his involvement with the SCLC remains unclear. But Anastasia Poliakova, coordinator for the Gorbachev Foundation in North America, said the 1990 Nobel Prize winner is genuinely interested and will be “using his connections and giving advice from his experiences.”
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