Banquet program, 4.75 x 7, for the Tenth Anniversary Banquet of The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia on August 14, 1967. King was serving as president of the conference. Signed across the top of the front cover in ballpoint, “Best wishes, Martin Luther King.” Accompanied by an unsigned program for the three day conference, the theme for the event being “Where Do We Go From Here,” which was the title of the speech given by King on two days before the banquet. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC, first known as Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration) is a civil rights organization founded in January 1957. Proposed by Bayard Rustin and later headed by Martin Luther King, Jr. the organization expressed these individuals’ belief that a wider organization could be built upon the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, hence the original name. The organization focused on non-violent civil disobedience and believed that it could use that to gain the civil rights that African Americans lacked at the time. Other prominent members of the organization included Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young. During the early 1960's, the group was considered more radical than the older NAACP and more conservative than the younger Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In fine condition. COA John Reznikoff/PSA/DNA and R&R COA.
