The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) profoundly affected the modern civil rights movement as well as the course of American political history in the second half of the twentieth century. The organization's records provide researchers with a treasure of primary source material on the complexities of organizing a successful mass protest movement. Organizational working papers, internal memoranda, correspondence, minutes of meetings, field reports, press releases and pamphlet publications, questionnaire replies and statistical compilations, and many other types of documents bring to light the struggle for civil rights. The files of the Records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1954-1970, Part 4: Records of the Program Department offer some of the most outstanding research opportunities in the SCLC collection. They include a wealth of primary material from the front lines of the civil rights movement, including field reports, survey materials, and correspondence.