Journal Articles
“ ‘The Bright Sunshine of a New Day’: John Hervey Wheeler, Black Business, and Civil Rights in North Carolina, 1929-1964,” North Carolina Historical Review 93 (July 2016)
This journal article challenges historians to reexamine the contributions black business leaders like Wheeler made to the civil rights movement during the high tide of direct action protests. When the sit-in movement began in 1960, not only did Wheeler support student activists publicly but he also took a hardline stance in the face of white power brokers’ attempts to privately negotiate an end to sit-in demonstrations in Durham and throughout North Carolina. Moreover, this work highlights the ways Wheeler continued to work locally, statewide, regionally, and nationally, to prioritize his economic concerns for African Americans and the South overall.
In addition to highlighting Wheeler’s career as a banker and civil rights lawyer, this work examines his appointment by President John F. Kennedy in March 1961 to the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO), a forerunner to the Equal Opportunity Commission authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It represents the first historical publication on the life and works of John Hervey Wheeler. More recently, my research caught the attention of North Carolina Congressman G. K. Butterfield who used the article as the basis for a bill he introduced before Congress to rename a federal building the John Hervey Wheeler United States Courthouse. Wheeler had been a mentor to Congressman Butterfield in the 1970s.