[1][2][3][4][5][6] During latter years of the Great Depression, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) recognized that many New Deal programs were failing in the US South.

They advocated for a regional conference "to address the repression of civil liberties in southern cities," which both FDR and wife Eleanor Roosevelt embraced.

They included: United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black; Works Progress Administration director Aubrey Willis Williams, civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, Highlander Folk School co-founder James Dombrowski, Alabama governor Bibb Graves, and activist Virginia Foster Durr.

SCHW's "interracial nature was particularly unsettling for many white southerners" and experienced disruption by segregationists, leading to negative publicity in local newspapers.

[1] On November 20, 1948, SCHW leaders met at Monticello, Virginia and passed a resolution to reformulate the organizations's last remaining group, the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), "committed solely to the ending of segregation in the south."