The Progressive National Baptist Convention was born from a leadership dispute inside the older National Baptist Convention, USA, that had been building through the 1950s. A group of pastors, dissatisfied with the convention's entrenched presidency and its caution toward the civil rights campaigns then spreading across the South, pushed for term limits on convention officers and stronger institutional backing for the movement. When those reforms failed, L. Venchael Booth (1919-2002), pastor of Zion Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, issued a public call to organize a new convention.
On November 14 and 15, 1961, thirty-three delegates from fourteen states answered that call and met at Booth's church, voting to organize the Progressive National Baptist Convention. T. M. Chambers was elected its first president, though Booth is remembered as the convention's founder and initiator. Martin Luther King Jr. and the eminent Brooklyn pastor Gardner C. Taylor were among the ministers who aligned with the new convention, which from its founding embraced the nonviolent civil rights movement in a way its parent body had not, and King remained closely tied to the Progressive Convention until his assassination in 1968.