New Zion Baptist Church — SCLC Founding Site

In February 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. and other Southern ministers gathered at this Tremé church to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King was elected the SCLC's first president at the meeting. The organization was formed in New Orleans, not Atlanta, because the city had the infrastructure of Black churches and political organizations that made such a gathering possible. New Orleans had been the largest city in the South at the start of the Civil War, and its network of Black institutions — built through generations in a city that had served as the nation's largest port in the nineteenth century — provided the organizational foundation the SCLC needed. The church where these ministers met to coordinate the movement still holds regular services and remains an active congregation. No historical marker proportional to the event's significance currently exists at the site.