
          Looking Back . . . SRC and the Nation
          By StaffStaff
          Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, p. 15
          
          In 1919 the Commission on Interracial Cooperation was
started. Thirty-five years later the Commission was reorganized as the
Southern_Regional_Council. Over the past seven decades, Southerners of
good will have worked as one within these organizations to achieve a
better place to live.
          Some of the organization's most important accomplishments during
these decades include:
Helping to end lynchings in the South;The first network of biracial state councils in the South
providing the major support for public_schools for all children;Documenting the need for the first federal executive order
barring racial discrimination;Documenting the need for the first federal civil_rights act in
this century;Helping to register more than two million black_voters in the
South;Research prompting federal intervention to protect the lives
and safety of civil_rights workers in the 195Os and'60s;A Citizens' Board of Inquiry into poverty and hunger--work
credited with spurring the first national anti-hunger legislation;Planting the seeds of an integrated cooperative farmers
movement in the 1960s and 1970s;A Southwide governmental monitoring project that documented
the failures of the Nixon Administration's "New federalism;"A model demonstration project that successfully placed more
than 400 black_women in managerial positions in the South. This
project later became a major initiative in the federal_government
labor programs;A task force on Southern rural development offering a
blueprint for a national rural policy;Research in the 1970s that led to the adoption of the first
nationwide affirmative_action plan in the U. S. courts;Helping to bring more democratic governments to almost a
thousand jurisdictions across the South.
        
