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.