According to internal documents the CIC believed that WWI had "changed the whole status of race relationships," and that blacks had grown resolved to obtain "things hitherto not hoped for".
[3] The organization worked to oppose lynching, mob violence, and peonage and to educate white southerners concerning the worst aspects of racial abuse.
Belle Harris Bennett, leader of the Southern Methodist Women's Missionary Council, created the CIC's Woman's Work Department.
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.
The Commission on Interracial Cooperation had clearly helped prepare the South to enter a new phase in the movement towards racial justice in the United States.