Weil always acknowledged that as a Southerner she had inherited racial prejudices. Her career prior to civil rights movement included paternalistic support of black uplift through philanthropy, anti-lynching campaigns, and social-service advocacy. With Frank Graham and other southern liberals she had supported the changing hearts and minds approach. By the late 1940s she abandoned gradualism and endorsed integration. She was a long time executive member of the biracial North Carolina Council on Human relations and joined the Southern Regional Council. Locally, she opened her home for a biracial Women's Goodwill Committee and publicly opposed the state's Pearsall Plan to keep schools open while impeding integration. She built a municipal swimming pool for blacks and led an integrated march into a segregated hotel.