Descripción de los sistemas experimentales utilizados

In his 1965 work Who Speaks for the Negro?, American poet laureate Robert Penn Warren wrote, “Mr. [John] Wheeler knows the nature of institutions. He knows how the machinery works.”46

Warren published Who Speaks for the Negro? after recording extensive interviews in 1964 with a cross-section of forty-three African American civil rights leaders, Wheeler among them.47 The conversations were what Warren described as his attempt to “find out something, first hand, about the people, some of them anyway, who are making the Negro Revolution what it is–one of the dramatic events of the American story.”48 In Who Speaks for the Negro?, Warren primarily allowed the interviews to drive his narrative, while also providing context along with his own impressions of the interviewees and the general tone during his conversations with them.

46

Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York: Random House, 1965), 301.

47_{Most of these oral interviews can be found digitally accessed online at:}

http://libguides.uky.edu/content.php?pid=165117&sid=1486057, the Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project, #OHRPWCR, in the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky; interviews are also associated with the Robert Penn Warren Papers, 1916-1967, #78M1, also at the University of Kentucky; All of these oral interviews can also be digitally accessed online at “Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?: an Archival Collection”at: http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/; A complete list of other interviewees include: Richard Gunn, Milton A. Galamison, Martin Luther King, Jr., James M. Lawson, Malcolm X, William Stuart Nelson, James Baldwin, Carroll G. Barber, Ezell A. Blair, Jean Wheeler, Stokely Carmichael, Lucy Thorton, Joe Carter, James Forman, James L. Farmer, Jr., Kenneth Bancroft Clark, Vernon E. Jordan, Adam Clayton Powell, William Hastie, Carl T. Rowan, Bayard Rustin, Kelly Smith, William

Stringfellow, Ruth Turner, Wyatt Walker, Roy Wilkins, Claire Harvey, Robert Collins, Lolis Elie, Nils Douglas, Felton G. Clark, Richard Murphy, Gilbert Moses, Aaron Henry, Robert Parris Moses, Toogaloo Students, Ralph Ellison, Stephen Wright, Avon Williams, Andrew Young, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Toure], Whitney Young, Wiley A. Branton, Montgomery King, Jackson College Students, Neil Goldschmidt, and Charles Evers.

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In his section on Wheeler, included in chapter four, “Leadership from the Periphery,” Warren concluded:

John Hervey Wheeler trusts in the reordering of society – by whacking away at the periphery – because he believes in the possibilities of the society. He understands institutions, and because he understands them he is a ‘success.’ As a success he understands the long process of change, the fact that the success of a Negro insurance company draws white insurance companies to compete for the Negro policy and therefore affects the structure of society. The fact that a Negro bank is there to make loans means that white banks will liberalize their policy of loans to Negroes. He sees the precise limits of the campaign for civil rights, but also the precise gains…He understands institutions, and because he understands them he knows how to whack away at them. Success is one of the things you whack with.49 Warren’s assessment was correct and in-line with how Wheeler viewed his individual role and responsibility in American society. He made the most out of various institutional resources in order to break down what he described as those “artificial barriers which [kept] [blacks] away from the total market.”50

This is what Wheeler’s life reveals about the broader themes of the civil rights movement and why his story is so compelling.

The actual exchange between Warren and Wheeler, conducted in June 1964, is even more revealing. Indeed, one is struck by how Wheeler understood and defined civil rights for himself, which provides the framework for understanding how and why he confronted racial injustice in the way that he did. As Wheeler explained to Warren:

Well, we’ve got a long way to go before a Negro boy or girl or man or woman has the same open invitation to industry and to industrial employment or to training or to promotion advantages that a white person would have. This is what integration

49

Ibid., 304.

50_{Interview with John Hervey Wheeler by Robert Penn Warren, June 30, 1964, original interview transcript can}

be accessed online at “Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?: an Archival Collection,”

http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/sites/default/files/RPW.reel_.3.T.H.%20Wheeler.pgs _.968-

1001.doc.pdf, 2; audio version also available through “Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?: an Archival Collection,” http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/interview/john-hervey-wheeler.

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would mean to me, that the freedom of movement in the society would be complete. We’ve been whacking away at the periphery of it.51

Wheeler continued:

We’ve gotten the travel business straightened out some time ago, so far as public carriers are concerned, and the dining cars and the sleeping cars and now the hotels and restaurants. This establishes the physical movement. But there’s also got to be a freedom of movement in all facets of the society. This means if a man is good enough he goes right on to the top.52

John Wheeler connected blacks' battle for civil rights to obtaining “freedom of movement,” or a fully integrated society. He championed true integration as the most effective way to accomplish this ultimate objective. He explained that until blacks received freedom of movement in all areas of American society—in a physical and practical sense— then they had no real freedom. In other words, “freedom of movement,” or a fully integrated society could only be achieved if implemented in a way that was both beneficial and fair to African Americans and black institutions in general. On this point, Wheeler disagreed with the assertion, from both blacks and whites, that black institutions wanted to perpetuate segregation because it “has meant a protective market.”53 In this way, Wheeler was also against tokenism to the extent that once an African American gained an inside position with a white institution, they had to have their “thinking straight.”54 This meant “somebody has got to get in and see how it’s done so you can’t give them the runaround any more…This is not a

51

Ibid., 19.

52_{Interview with John Hervey Wheeler by Robert Penn Warren, June 30, 1964, original interview transcript can}

be accessed online at “Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?: an Archival Collection,” http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/sites/default/files/RPW.reel_.3.T.H.%20Wheeler.pgs _.968-

1001.doc.pdf, 19-20; audio version also available through “Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?:

an Archival Collection,” http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/interview/john-hervey-wheeler.

53

Ibid.

54_{Ibid., 18.}

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selfish reason…and once he gets in he’s got to have the guts to make the demands and say to the other fellows, now come on, I’ll support you because I know what they’re doing in terms of qualifications of other people who are no better than you are. If he’s that kind of man, all right. If he’s going to get in and thumb his nose at the rest, I wouldn’t think well of him.”55

John Hervey Wheeler’s vision for American society and New South prosperity was quite clear, and as he told a reporter in 1953, “I started off life even.”56

In his later years, Wheeler outlined what he had to do because of this: “I just try to work for other people.

That’s been my major effort.”57

He fought for fairness on behalf of all Americans. On a fundamental level, Wheeler’s faith in American democracy fueled his desire for all Americans to share in this ideal, as he “assumed all along that all of the people are alike essentially. There’s no basic difference between people because of race. If you can speak the same language you then are completely on the same base.”58 Wheeler worked on behalf of people and institutions, and he led by example, putting the good of the public above his own self interests. His permanent motto was “The Battle for Freedom Begins Every Morning,” which meant that fighting against racial injustice was a difficult and continuous struggle that was, in many ways, never finished. It implies that every aspect of the black freedom movement was part of a larger goal that could not be won overnight. That “long process of change” as Robert Penn Warren described it, or “whacking away at the periphery” as

55_Ibid.

56_{“Decision Led to Banking,” Durham Morning Heralds, August 2, 1953.}

57_{“Tarheel of the Week – John Wheeler: Working Quietly for the Progress of Blacks,” The News and Observer,}

March 15, 1970; “Civil Rights Leader Dies in Durham,” Raleigh News and Observer, July 7, 1978.

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Wheeler explained, or “Long Civil Rights Movement” as historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall argues, called for a serious, lifelong, commitment.59

This life story is first and foremost a public biography of a figure whose contributions and accomplishments were so broad and immense that they far exceed the scope of these pages. As such, it does not seek, nor does it attempt, to tell the entire life story of an individual engaged in so many activities. While this biographical narrative is particularly concerned with Wheeler’s civil rights activism between the 1940s and 1960s, his entire career spanned from the 1930s through the 1970s. The story’s major thrust begins in the 1930s, builds momentum during the 1940s, and reaches high impact during the 1950s and 1960s when Wheeler’s influence across the country would have been at its peak. On that same note, while it is not my objective to provide insight into every avenue of Wheeler’s life interests, at various moments I will touch on significant aspects of his personal and private life to give the reader a more complete depiction of the man. While there is much interest in all facets of Wheeler’s activities, in many instances details about other aspects of his life and

59 _{Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” The Journal of}

American History Vol. 91, Issue 4, http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/printpage.cgi.; In her essay, Hall argues that the “truer story–the story of a ‘long civil rights movement’ [is one that] took root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s, was intimately tied to the ‘rise and fall of the New Deal Order,’ accelerated during World War II, stretched far beyond the South, was continuously and ferociously contested, and in the 1960s and 1970s inspired a ‘movement of movements’ that ‘def[ies] any narrative of collapse.’ ”(p. 2) Hall also contends that a central element in exploring a “Long Civil Rights Movement,” depends heavily on

understanding the movement’s continuous emphasis on economic inequality; Dennis C. Dickerson, Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young, Jr. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), 1-6. Dickerson provides a useful framework for understanding the unique position that some black leaders had during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He explains that the mediating or middle ground role played by individuals such as Whitney Young proved significant in helping whites and blacks understand each other’s perspective. For Young that role often involved being a “militant mediator” and courting white institutions for their financial support of the National Urban League. While John Wheeler played a similar role as Young, he did not have the same obligations and dependence on white philanthropic foundations and government funded agencies in the same way as Young. Wheeler did seek to utilize those resources, but operated on his own terms; Raymond Gavins, The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884-1970 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1977), ix. Through the life of Gordon Hancock, Gavins explains the unique position of

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in some cases his local community leadership, which was grounded in Durham will be missing from these pages as well.60

This dissertation is arranged both chronologically and thematically in seven chapters. Chapter one explores John Wheeler’s family background in the decades after emancipation and particularly highlights his parents' educational accomplishments, which put them on the path to middle class respectability in the early part of the twentieth century. It also underscores how the Wheeler family's middle class status and economic independence provided John Hervey and his siblings with a level of privilege most black Americans did not enjoy. Chapter two explores Wheeler's move to Durham, North Carolina after college and outlines the establishment and growth of the black Mechanics and Farmers Bank between 1908 and 1929. The chapter is also situated within the context of the Great Depression and points to how Durham's black businessmen served as stalwart community leaders and the ways in which the bank and community provided a training-ground for Wheeler's development as a black business activist. I argue that this was especially true after 1935 with the formation of the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs, an organization that provided the city's black community with an outlet to agitate more assertively and collectively for full citizenship.

black moderate leaders in the South, especially during and post-World War II. He maintains that these leaders forged a new path for race relations, especially between black moderates and white liberals in the South. Gavins maintains that black moderates in the generations before the direct action phase of the civil rights movement laid the groundwork for black leaders such as John Wheeler who were not conservative or

accommodating to whites, but were willing to work within the white power-structure and at the same time push a more aggressive agenda than did their predecessors; See also Henry L. Suggs, P. B. Young Newspaperman: Race, Politics, and Journalism in the New South (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,1988), ix-x.

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Chapter three explores the pivotal impact that World War II had on African Americans living in Durham and throughout North Carolina and the South. It argues that Wheeler’s activism both during and after the war emphasized his belief in educational equality as the most essential ingredient toward the expansion of economic opportunities for black Americans. It was at the end of World War II when he first articulated his vision of New South prosperity and saw the period as a critical juncture for states like North Carolina and the South as a whole to remove the problem of racial segregation from their social fabric. This would then allow black Americans to take part in the benefits of full citizenship and postwar prosperity so that they could help buildup their beloved Southland from a position of economic strength. The chapter also shows how Wheeler embraced legal tactics to challenge Durham's unjust educational system, which had effectively stifled black school children from learning the skills needed to obtain better employment opportunities once they graduated. Chapter four explores the efforts of Wheeler and other African Americans in seeking immediate school desegregation directly following the Brown decision. I argue that while white local and state leaders devised creative laws to forestall desegregation, from the moment Brown was handed down black leaders immediately worked toward its compliance and took a variety of proactive measures to publicize their desires for implementation. In doing so, Wheeler became a leading critic of the laws enacted in Brown's aftermath and likened those measures to economic suicide.

Chapter five explores Wheeler’s activism during the direct action phase of the civil rights movement. It pushes us to consider how a black businessman in John Wheeler's position could serve not as an obstacle to, but a steadfast advocate of, non-violent direct action during the 1960s. I argue that despite the emergence of student-centered leadership

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with the sit-in movement in 1960, Wheeler did not take a sidelines position. Instead, he continued to operate behind-the-scenes while also publicly and privately lending his support to student activism. In fact, Wheeler had already accepted direct action as a strategy and as a way to compel inflexible white leaders at the local and state level to address black grievances in earnest. Chapter six explores Wheeler’s civil rights leadership and impact on the movement beyond Durham and the state of North Carolina. During these years, he utilized his increasing political influence regionally and nationally to directly confront public policies related to discrimination in employment and voting rights for African Americans. Not only that, but Wheeler vigorously championed the inclusion of blacks in high-level decision- making positions and condemned government agencies for their own failures in implementing new employment policies as mandated by the federal government.

Chapter seven, the dissertation's final piece, explores and highlights the limitations of black leadership during the 1960s. It focuses on urban renewal and poverty in North Carolina in the context of LBJ's Great Society. I seek to offer a counter narrative by arguing that despite the unfortunate realities of urban renewal in places like Durham, Wheeler's support for the federally-funded redevelopment program fit within his own framework of how best to implement the gains already being won by the civil rights movement. Wheeler and other leaders were hopeful that urban renewal would ultimately guarantee an open society unhampered by racial and economic inequality where African Americans could finally enjoy American democracy.

CHAPTER 1

“I STARTED OFF LIFE EVEN”: FAMILY, MOREHOUSE COLLEGE, AND MIDDLE-CLASS RESPECTABILITY, 1865-1929

…Trust God–trust him for success, for support, for life. If in this way you will trust God, he by his word, by his Spirit and by his providence, will lead you into the highest usefulness of which, in your day and generation, you are capable.61

—John G. Fee, 1891

John Hervey Wheeler was born on New Year’s Day 1908 to Margaret Hervey and John Leonidas Wheeler on the campus of Kittrell College in rural Vance County, North Carolina. At the time, John Hervey's father was in his fourth year as president of the small African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church school founded in 1886. In addition to their first child, 1908 in general represented new beginnings and transition for the Wheelers. In the previous decade, they made their home in Kittrell—about 37 miles north of Raleigh. By