Encyclopedia article about the Birmingham-based Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) which worked from 1938 to 1948 and tried to bring long-overdue New Deal-inspired reforms to the South. In particular, the organization was committed to improving social justice and civil rights and instituting electoral reform in the region by repealing the poll tax. Perhaps the most noteworthy of a number of organizations that grew out of the movement for regional reform in the 1930s, the SCHW folded because of funding problems and charges of harboring Communist sympathies, but it laid the groundwork for future civil rights activism.

The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the aggregation and enhancement of partner metadata.

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Forms part of the Encyclopedia of Alabama.