Commission on Interracial Cooperation

The Commission on Interracial Cooperation was formed in the U.S. South in 1919 in the aftermath of violent race riots that occurred the previous year in several southern cities. The organization worked to oppose lynching, mob violence, and peonage and to educate white southerners concerning the worst aspects of racial abuse. In 1944 it merged with the Southern Regional Council.

The Commission did some prominent work in modifying racial contacts by preventing race riots and providing the African American population of the South with schools. It also helped make the social condition of black people in that part of the country, where they were most heavily populated, better.

The Commission on Interracial Cooperation was started in 1919 by African Americans and whites who feared that the changed manner of returning African American soldiers would cause massacres all over the land. The Commission worked astutely, competently and quietly to avoid this. Before this commission was created, there were 83 lynchings; ten years later (1929) this number dropped to ten. Through the work of this commission, African Americans and whites had meetings to confer the African American’s problems, a gradually increasing group on both sides learned to know the goals and sympathies of each other.

The key leaders of the commission included Tuskegee Institute president Robert R. Moton, New York investment banker George Foster Peabody, Virginia governor Harry F. Byrd, Wake Forest College president William Louis Poteat, and Georgia industrialist John J. Eagan. The commission was based in Atlanta but had other committees throughout the South. By the 1920s there were some eight hundred local interracial committees associated with this commission.

In 1930, financial troubles attributable to the Great Depression led the commission leaders to rethink the programs that were in effect. They chose to abandon much of their fieldwork to concentrate more heavily on research. In 1944, a number of conferences lead to the establishment of the Southern Regional Council. Many interracial movement leaders agreed that the Commission of Interracial Cooperation programs were out-of-date, and they supported the commission’s merger with the Southern Regional Council. The Commission of Interracial Cooperation had clearly helped prepare the South to enter a new phase in the movement towards racial justice in the United States.

Sources

• Burrows, Edward, PhD. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation, 1919-1944 : a case study in the history of the interracial movement in the South. 1954.
• Commission on Interracial Cooperation in The New Georgia Encyclopedia
• Robert Russa Moton and The Commission on Interracial Cooperation

For further reading

• John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1994).
• Ann Wells Ellis, "A Crusade against 'Wretched Attitudes': The Commission on Interracial Cooperation's Activities in Atlanta," Atlanta Historical Journal 23 (spring 1979).
• Ann Wells Ellis, "'Uncle Sam Is My Shepherd': The Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the New Deal in Georgia," Atlanta Historical Journal 30 (spring 1986).
• Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
• Julia Anne McDonough, "Men and Women of Good Will: A History of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Southern Regional Council, 1919-1954" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1993).
• North Carolina Commission on Interracial Cooperation Records, 1922-1949 in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.