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John Hervey Wheeler (January 1, 1908-July 6, 1978) was a prominent African American bank president, civil rights lawyer, political activist, civic leader, educator, statesman, and philanthropist. He was also an accomplished violinist and avid tennis player. On Christmas Day 1935, Wheeler married the former Selena Lucille Warren (1912-2014), the daughter of Julia McCauley and Dr. Stanford L. Warren, a co-founder and one time president of the Mechanics and Farmers Bank (M&F Bank). They had two children: Julia and Warren Hervey Wheeler. John Hervey spent his professional and public life based in Durham, North Carolina and by the 1960s was the state's most influential black power broker; he was among the top civil rights leaders in the South. In 1929, he joined the M&F Bank and remained with the financial institution his entire career, rising from the position of bank teller to the presidency. He served in the latter capacity from August 1952 until his death. Wheeler was born on January 1, 1908 in Kittrell, North Carolina (Vance County) to John Leonidas and Margaret Hervey Wheeler. The Wheeler family came from the town of Nicholasville in Jessamine County, Kentucky.

Early Life and Education

Both John Leonidas and Margaret Hervey attended Wilberforce University (Wilberforce, Ohio), the flagship educational institution of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in the last decade of the nineteenth century. John Leonidas graduated from Wilberforce in 1897, then came to the South in 1898 to teach at Kittrell College (1886), another AME Church school located in Kittrell, North Carolina, about thirty-seven miles north of Raleigh. Margaret Hervey came to Kittrell to teach sewing in the industrial education department after graduating in 1900. The two were married on September 25, 1901. Shortly after the birth of their second child, John Hervey, the Wheelers relocated to Durham, North Carolina in July 1908 after John Leonidas accepted a position as an insurance agent with the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association (now the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company). While in Durham, the Wheelers attended St. Joseph's AME Church and were part of the growing black middle class in the city where they lived in the third ward known as Hayti (Hay-tí). At the North Carolina Mutual (N.C. Mutual), John Leonidas went to work for the Raleigh district before being called to the home office in 1910 where he took over the records department.

By 1912, John Leonidas received a promotion with the company, which prompted the family to relocate to Atlanta, Georgia where he took over the N.C. Mutual's Atlanta office on "Sweet Auburn" Avenue where he also became supervisor for all of Georgia. The N.C. Mutual's Atlanta office opened in 1911 under the direction of Atlanta University Professor William B. Matthews. John Leonidas eventually became an executive with the N.C. Mutual: board of directors (1922), regional supervisor (1927), assistant agency director (1933), and vice president (1948). In addition to John Hervey, the other Wheeler children included Ruth Hervey (b. 1906) and Margery Janice (b. 1913). The Wheeler children came of age as part of Atlanta's black middle class elite, which included growing up alongside the prominent Dobbs family of Atlanta. Margaret Hervey homeschooled her three children until third grade when they enrolled in the Atlanta Public Schools to attend Butler Street Elementary School until seventh grade, as the city did not have a public high school for black children until 1924 when it built Booker T. Washington High School. The family attended "Big" Bethel AME Church and John Leonidas and Margaret Hervey taught Sunday School. They also became civic leaders in black Atlanta: John Leonidas supported the Butler Street YMCA and athletics at all of the city's black schools; Margaret Hervey became active in the Carrie Steele-Pitts Orphans Home and the Atlanta Woman's Club. John Hervey attended high school at Morehouse Academy (1921-1925) and then matriculated to Morehouse College (1925-1929), where he graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. degree in June 1929. Professional Career

After graduation, John Hervey moved to Durham where he began his business career with the M&F Bank as a bank teller. The M&F Bank was established as a sister institution to the N.C. Mutual in 1908. He advanced through the company's ranks, becoming assistant cashier (1939), cashier (1940), then cashier and executive vice president (1944), before becoming bank president in 1952 at the age of forty-four, at the time the youngest black bank president in the country. In 1950, he became president of the National Negro Bankers Association (NNBA), the professional organization to the larger black banking industry; he served two terms with the NNBA. As M&F Bank president, Wheeler carried the banner as a community bank while also expanding its reach. He used banking to break down artificial barriers in order to open up total markets to black businesses and to create competition with white businesses to compel them to extend their policies to blacks. Under Wheeler's leadership, M&F Bank went from operating branches in just two cities (Durham and Raleigh), to also having a branch in Charlotte. During his tenure, the bank's assets went from just over $5 million when he took over, to $15 million in 1964, $21.5 million in 1970, and reached $41 million by 1976.

Civil Rights Activism

During World War II, Wheeler enrolled in law school at the North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) where, in 1947, he was among the first law school graduates. He had a strong commitment to black higher education in the South and in 1935 began his tenure on the boards of trustees at Morehouse College and Atlanta University. He became a political activist through his involvement with an organization known as the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs (DCNA), a civil rights organization founded by black leaders in Durham in 1935. The DCNA was organized to "consider matters affecting the interest of the Negroes in the Community, to devise and sponsor programs designed to promote the welfare and to otherwise act in behalf of the Negro Citizens." Wheeler had stints as the DCNA's economic committee chairman and then education committee chairman (1944-1957) before taking over as the organization's chairman in 1957, a position he held until 1978. The position as DCNA chairman gained him a great deal of political influence as the organization helped African Americans gain a significant voting bloc in the city of Durham. Wheeler’s position as chairman also brought with it a high level of political clout with the state Democratic Party.

It was through the DCNA's education committee that Wheeler led a legal challenge toward school equalization in Durham and other cities across North Carolina. In 1951, a judge ruled in the case Blue, et. al. v. Durham Public School District (1951) that "plaintiffs have been, and are, discriminated against on account of their race and that they are entitled to injunctive relief." In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, Wheeler and other black leaders from across North Carolina called for immediate implementation. They ultimately filed several school desegregation suits before the decade ended. In 1956, he and several other Durham attorneys, including future CORE chairman Floyd B. McKissick, Sr. won the U.S. Supreme Court case Frasier v. Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina (1956), which led to the first three African American undergraduates to gain admission to the state's flagship institution.

John H. Wheeler's civil rights leadership reached its zenith during the 1960s. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed him to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO). In 1963, Wheeler became an incorporator of the North Carolina Fund, an ambitious antipoverty agency established by the state’s governor Terry Sanford to help eradicate issues of poverty; the Fund became a model for Lyndon B. Johnson's national War on Poverty initiative. Wheeler joined the organization's board of directors and his bank became the repository for its accounts. In 1964, Sanford named Wheeler as a delegate to the Democratic Party’s national convention, the first African American from the state to do so. That same year, Wheeler became the first African American president of the Southern Regional Council (SRC), a civil rights organization founded in 1944 and based in Atlanta, Georgia. Beginning in May 1962, the SRC became the administrator over the Voter Education Project (VEP), which helped increase voter registration in the South leading up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Legacy

In the last decade of his life, John Hervey Wheeler continued his activism and refused to relinquish the bulk of his numerous responsibilities. During this same time, Wheeler was on the receiving end of many awards and accolades for his work in the field of civil rights. In 1967, his alma mater presented him with an honorary doctorate degree for his tireless leadership as a member of the school's board of trustees. He had previously received honorary doctorates from Shaw University, Johnson C. Smith University, and Tuskegee University. In 1970, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Duke University, where former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford became president. That same year, he received the Frank Porter Graham Civil Liberties Award for his defense of freedom for all North Carolinians; the next year, North Carolina Central University bestowed upon him an honorary doctorate as well. On January 4, 1976, Morehouse College formally dedicated John H. Wheeler Hall as the school's Social Sciences and Business Administration Building.