Mr. Speaker, let me first thank the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Titus) for her friendship, leadership, and for yielding me the time this afternoon. I also thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr.…
Mr. Speaker, let me first thank the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Titus) for her friendship, leadership, and for yielding me the time this afternoon. I also thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Barletta) as well.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of my bill, H.R. 3460, that seeks to name the United States courthouse located at 323 East Chapel Hill Street in Durham, North Carolina, as the John Hervey Wheeler United States Courthouse.
This bill, Mr. Speaker, has the support from my friends in the North Carolina congressional delegation and the entire Durham community. It was favorably reported out of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee several days ago.
John Hervey Wheeler, Mr. Speaker, was a prominent African American bank president, civil rights lawyer, political activist, civic leader, educator, statesman, and philanthropist. He was a family friend as well.
Mr. Wheeler was born on the campus of Kittrell College in Vance County, North Carolina, on New Year's Day in 1908, as the second child to the former Margaret Hervey and John Leonidas Wheeler.
After the Wheeler family relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, John Wheeler attended high school at Morehouse Academy from 1921 to 1925, and then matriculated to Morehouse College from 1925 to 1929, where he graduated summa cum laude in June of 1929.
After graduation, Mr. Wheeler moved to Durham where he began his career
with the Mechanics & Farmers Bank as a bank teller. He advanced through the company's ranks and in 1944, became executive vice president. Eight years later, Mr. Wheeler would become bank president. At the age of 44, he was the youngest African American bank president in the country.
As president, Mr. Wheeler saw the bank grow from operating branches in two cities, Durham and Raleigh, to also having a branch in Charlotte. During his tenure the bank's assets grew from $5 million to $41 million.
John Wheeler, Mr. Speaker, was instrumental in making loans to hundreds of families in North Carolina, enabling them to purchase their homes. He made loans to churches and businesses, loans they otherwise would not have been able to obtain because of discriminatory lending practices.
John Wheeler was eager to become a lawyer. He 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.
John Wheeler became a thoughtful activist through his involvement known as the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs, a community-based civil and political organization founded in Durham in 1935. Mr. Wheeler began serving as chairman in 1957, a position he held until 1978. The organization continues today as the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People.
During my entire time in Durham, Mr. Speaker, as a student at North Carolina Central University, John Wheeler was a titan of a community leader, well respected, and effective. On many occasions, he personally counseled me by providing advice that I recall to this day.
It was through the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs that Attorney Wheeler and Attorney M. Hugh Thompson and Attorney Oliver Hill of Richmond, Virginia, challenged several North Carolina school boards by alleging they were failing to provide equal funding to African American schools. It was a constitutional challenge.
In the case of Blue v. Durham Public School District filed on May 18, 1949, Wheeler, Thompson, and Hill were successful in proving that the Durham Public School District was violating the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution.
The court entered its order and I have a copy with me today, Mr. Speaker. I will simply read one sentence:
The net result of what has been done leaves Negro school
children at many disadvantages which must be overcome.
The court ordered equal funding for the schools on January 26, 1951, in the very building we are naming today.
Incidentally, Mr. Speaker, the State courthouse in Richmond, Virginia, is named for his cocounsel, Oliver Hill. In my home county of Wilson, also in 1949, Black residents employed Attorney Wheeler to represent them in a similar lawsuit because the Wilson County School Board refused to build any public schools in the rural portions of the county for African American children.
Mr. Wheeler won that case as well, and because of the litigation, two consolidated schools were constructed. Thousands of African American children in Wilson County benefited by obtaining a high school education.
Mr. Wheeler ultimately filed several school desegregation lawsuits before the end of the decade. In 1956, he and several other Durham attorneys, including future CORE chairman, Floyd B. McKissick, Sr., won the U.S. Supreme Court case of Frasier v. Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina, which led to the first three African American undergraduates to gain admission to our State's flagship institution.
In 1961, President Kennedy appointed John Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. In 1963, Mr. Wheeler became an incorporator of the North Carolina Fund, an ambitious antipoverty agency established by then-Governor Terry Sanford to help eradicate poverty. Mr. Wheeler joined the organization's board, and his bank became the repository for its accounts.
In 1964, then-Governor Terry Sanford named John Wheeler as a delegate to the Democratic Party's national convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Mr. Wheeler was the first African American in North Carolina to be a convention delegate.
That same year, Mr. Wheeler became the first African American President of the Southern Regional Council, a civil rights organization founded in 1944 and based in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1967, John Wheeler received an honorary doctorate from Morehouse College for his tireless leadership as a member of the school's board of trustees. He had previously received honorary doctorates from Shaw University in Raleigh, Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, and Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama.
In 1970, Mr. Wheeler was awarded an honorary doctorate from Duke University, and that same year received the Frank Porter Graham civil liberties award for his defense of freedom for all North Carolinians.
In 1971, North Carolina Central University, my alma mater, also honored him with an honorary doctorate degree. On January 4, 1976, Morehouse College formally dedicated the John H. Wheeler Hall as the school's social sciences and business administration building.
On December 25, Christmas Day, in 1935, Mr. Wheeler married the former Selena Lucille Warren, the daughter of Julia McCauley and Dr. Stanford L. Warren, a cofounder and one-time president of the Mechanics & Farmers Bank. They had two children, Julia Taylor and Warren Hervey Wheeler. Mr. Wheeler passed away 40 years ago on July 6, 1978, at the age of 70.
Mr. Speaker, in closing, John Hervey Wheeler gave so much of himself to his community, State, and country. He accomplished more in his time on Earth than some could hope to accomplish in two lifetimes.
It is for these reasons that I respectfully urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on H.R. 3460, to direct that the United States courthouse be named in his honor.
