 Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, the pastor of Gillfield Baptist Church, had become friends with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early 1950s when they were both in divinity school in New York state.In 1957 they co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an important force for leadership of the movement in the South.Walker also founded the Petersburg Improvement Association (PIA), modeled on the Montgomery Improvement Association in Alabama.