The Good Life King participated in and led marches for blacks' right to vote , desegregation , labor rights , and other basic civil rights. King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia , and helped organize some of the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama . King helped organize the 1963 March on Washington , where he delivered his famous " I Have a Dream " speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial . The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with some success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were several dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities, who sometimes turned violent. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered King ...