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Southern Regional Council documents

 Collection
Collection number: ahc.MSS373

Scope and Contents

This collection consists of reports and newsletters published by the Southern Regional Council about African Americans living in the South. Report topics include: voter registration and politics, health care, school desegregation, the Memphis Sanitation Workers' Strike of 1968, and riots and civil disorder. The collection also contains episode transcripts from Will the Circle be Unbroken: A Personal History of the Civil Rights Movement in Five Southern Communities. In addition, there is a teacher's guide to the series.

Dates

  • 1944-1997, undated

Creator

Conditions Governing Access

This collection is open for research.

Conditions Governing Use

Unpublished manuscripts are protected by copyright. All requests to publish, quote, or reproduce must be submitted through the Kenan Research Center.

Biographical / Historical

The Southern Regional Council was founded in 1919 in Atlanta, Georgia, as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC). CIC published reports on economic, political, and social issues in the South to draw media attention to living conditions of African Americans in the region. SRC is based in Atlanta and is run by an Executive Director and a Board of Directors. In the 1930s, CIC worked with The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to research and publish The Tragedy of Lynching by Arthur Raper. The CIC reorganized in 1944 and became the Southern Regional Council (SRC) with a mission to “attain through research and action the ideals and practices of equal opportunity for all peoples of the region.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, SRC more actively supported civil rights, and was one of the first organizations to back the student led counter sit-in protest in Greensboro, North Carolina. The SRC developed programming and communication initiatives to improve education for all students and to increase voter registration. In 1978, SRC started publishing the journal Southern Changes. In 1997 the organization produced a documentary by Julian Bond (1940-2015) and George King (1946- ), Will the Circle be Unbroken: A Personal History of the Civil Rights Movement in Five Southern Communities, about the Civil Rights Movement as told through memoirs and oral histories. A year later, the George Foster Peabody Awards Program awarded it for excellence in production.

Extent

0.63 linear ft. (one document case and one half document case)

Language

English

Arrangement

This collection is arranged alphabetically by titles supplied by staff.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Gift, 1997

Existence and Location of Copies

This collection was partially digitized by JStore's Reveal Digital collection Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements. It is viewable at https://www.jstor.org/site/reveal-digital/behind-the-scenes-civil-rights-movements.

Related Materials

New South, Southern Regional Council, periodicals collection, Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

South Today, Southern Regional Council, periodicals collection, Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

Southern Changes, Southern Regional Council, periodicals collection, Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

Bias in Description

As archivists, we acknowledge our role as stewards of information. We choose how individuals and organizations are represented and described in our archives. We are not neutral, and bias is reflected in our descriptions, which may not accurately convey the racist or offensive aspects of collection materials. Archivists make mistakes and might use poor judgment. In working with this collection, we often re-use language used by the former owners of the material. This language provides context but often includes bias and prejudices reflective of the time in which it was created. The Kenan Research Center’s work is ongoing to implement reparative language where Library of Congress subject terms are inaccurate and obsolete.

Kenan Research Center welcomes feedback and questions regarding our archival descriptions. If you encounter harmful, offensive, or insensitive terminology or descriptions, please let us know by emailing reference@atlantahistorycenter.com. Your comments are essential to our work to create inclusive and thoughtful description.

Processing Information

This collection was reprocessed in 2022.

Title
Southern Regional Council documents
Subtitle
ahc.MSS373
Author
Leah Lefkowitz
Date
November 2022
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin

Repository Details

Part of the Kenan Research Center at Atlanta History Center Repository

Contact:
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Atlanta GA 30305
404-814-4040