Southern Conference Educational Fund

SOUTHERN CONFERENCE EDUCATIONAL FUND. Established in 1946 in New Orleans to eradicate segregation in the South, the first interracial organization publicly so committed in that region, the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) was the educational arm of the former Southern Conference for Human Welfare. SCEF enlisted the support of the most independent-minded, radical spirits among white and Black southerners. Aubrey W. Williams, the New Deal Left-liberal former head of the National Youth Administration, was the first president of SCEF and remained so nearly until his death in the mid-sixties. Through Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt was SCEF’s link to the national liberal movement. That was decisive in sustaining SCEF against the McCarthyite witch-hunting of arch-segregationists like Georgia governor Herman P. Talmadge and Mississippi senator James O. Eastland from the Right, and the red-baiting tactics of Cold War liberals on the moderate Left, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s “vital center,” who did what they could to isolate SCEF in the fifties.

Despite this, SCEF enlisted white southerners into the struggle to implement President Harry S. Truman’s civil rights proposals of 1948 and kept them engaged through the fallow years before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision sparked a grass-roots movement among southern Blacks. SCEF then worked alongside the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other Black southerners to make desegregation the living law of the land. The indefatigable Jim Dombrowski, Christian socialist and early associate of the Highlander Folk School, as executive director of SCEF was indispensable in keeping the organization alive and vigorous through these embattled times.

In its final, and in some ways most action-oriented period of the 1960s, SCEF carved out an original role bridging the older Left with the young militants of the New Left, which made the South the most creative theater for radical social movements in the years 1960–1965. SCEF raised funds, publicized the southern struggle, and brought northern activists to the aid of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1960 to 1963, when that lively group was regarded as somewhat of a nuisance by established civil rights organizations. Anne and Carl Braden, independent white socialists and directors of SCEF in its last phase, maintained its older alliances while nourishing the newer ones with younger Blacks in the South. Carl’s pungent pen and ubiquitous presence was too much for the red-hunting zealots of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Eventually they saddled him with a ten-month prison term for well-deserved contempt of that committee in 1961, making him one of the last victims of the domestic Cold War. He had been previously imprisoned on sedition charges in the 1950s, which were overturned in the courts, as the result of selling a home to a Black family.

Before the legislative victories of the Kennedy-Johnson years, SCEF had its office ransacked and its files carted off by Senator Eastland’s investigators working in collusion with Louisiana authorities in 1963. SCEF retaliated successfully, arguing for federal court intervention in state cases involving federal civil rights violations, a critical legal precedent that benefited the entire civil rights movement. Along with much of the civil rights movement, however, SCEF was a victim, in a sense, of success. The passage of the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965 that dismantled legal segregation and enforced the right to vote under the Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment, forced these organizations to search for a new raison d’être. Community organizing, the anti–Vietnam War movement, interracial working-class organizing in the Deep South and Appalachia, support of Black nationalism—none succeeded in melding Black and white activists together with that overriding sense of purpose of the earlier anti-Jim Crow cause. SCEF self-destructed by 1975, when infighting among Black nationalists and white ultra-leftists who had entered its ranks in the early 1970s destroyed its effectiveness, something that segregationists and anticommunist liberals had failed to do. It was another dispiriting example of the American Left’s endemic inability to sustain itself as a continuous, organized presence on the American scene.

Fosl, Catherine. Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002, 2006.

Klibaner, Irwin. “The Travail of Southern Radicals: The Southern Conference Educational Fund, 1946–1976.” Journal of Southern History 49 (May 1983).

Klibaner, Irwin. Conscience of a Troubled South: The Southern Conference Educational Fund, 1946–66. New York: Carlson, 1989.

Salmond, John A. “The Great Southern Commie Hunt: Aubrey Williams, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and the Internal Security Subcommittee.” South Atlantic Quarterly 77 (autumn 1978).

Southern Conference Educational Fund Records. Abstract and Descriptive Summary. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center. https://exploreuk.uky.edu/fa/findingaid/?id=xt7r4x54j865