The Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University in Atlanta, recently has made available to researchers the archives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC was founded in Atlanta in 1957 by a group of civil rights leaders from across the Southeast that included Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph David Abernathy, and Joseph E. Lowery, each of whom also served as president. The organization continues to operate today.
The collection, obtained by Emory in 2008, includes 918 boxes of materials documenting the activities of the SCLC from 1968 to 2007. The collection includes administrative files with correspondence, reports, memos, notebooks and meeting minutes, as well as photographs, flyers, and audio and video recordings.
Ginger Smith, interim director of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory, said, “Emory is honored to house these records and make them available, with equal access, to researchers of every age and stage of scholarly research, whether that person is a freshman in a history class or an award-winning historian writing another in a series of books on the civil rights movement.”
