This first comprehensive history of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference demonstrates the fallacy of closing the record on the nonviolent movement with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. After exploring the campaigns, educational programs, experiments in nonviolent social relations, and impact of SCLC in the King years, this study continues the coverage through the 1970s into the middle 1980s. Basing his account on both the King records and, for the first time, the extensive recent materials of SCLC, the author examines the continuity of the organization and its dream in the contemporary world. The result is a spirited account valuable to both the general reader and the student of black Americans and nonviolence. Both the faith and the strategy of the nonviolent dream are shown as vital elements of SCLC in its three decades of activism.