Southern black leaders publicly renounced Jim Crow and made demands “of the postwar South and nation” when fifty-nine of them, including three women, caucused at North Carolina College in 1942.

The conference statement, called the Durham Manifesto, was unprecedented. Not only were the participants “fundamentally opposed to the principle and practice of compulsory segregation.” They also assessed “current problems of racial discrimination and neglect,” demanding justice in political and civil rights, industry and labor, service occupations, education, agriculture, armed forces, social welfare, and health. Racial moderates, active in organizations such as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, NAACP, Urban League, and National Council of Negro Women, they challenged liberal white southerners, who met in Atlanta the next year and pledged to cooperate. The manifesto thus began a dialogue that created the Southern Regional Council in 1944; it also inspired grassroots struggles for equal citizenship such as “efforts at voter registration that formed the principal core of black activism in the South through the 1950s” (Robinson and Sullivan, 1991, p. 212).