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This chapter describes the constant battle Justice Sharp had to fight to keep from getting “promoted” to the federal bench, either the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals or the U.S. Supreme Court. Although she was ambivalent at best about the idea, Justice Sharp was a serious candidate for the highest court in the land for almost two decades prior to Sandra Day O'Connor's appointment in 1981. Her consideration at every vacancy reflected her national standing. Justice Sharp had scarcely gotten settled in her new position on North Carolina's highest court when Governor Terry Sanford offered her the opportunity to be the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. Had the timing been slightly different, it is likely that, as Sanford believed, he “could have probably put her on the Supreme Court of the United States” while John Kennedy was president.

Chapter 6 demonstrates the limitations of “black business activism” during the 1960s while focusing on urban renewal in Durham, North Carolina. Durham’s urban renewal program began in 1958, as a consequence of the Housing Act of 1954 and the state’s fledgling Research Triangle Park (RTP) initiative. The urban renewal program paved the way for an infrastructure that ultimately provided linkages in the physical landscape between RTP, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and North Carolina State University. Wheeler became the lone black member on the Durham Redevelopment Commission, the group responsible for administering the Bull City’s urban renewal program. I argue that, in part, Wheeler’s support for the federally funded urban redevelopment program fit within his own framework of how best to implement the gains already being won by the civil rights movement. The chapter also examines the “War on Poverty” in North Carolina in the context of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. It does so through trying to better understand Wheeler’s involvement with the North Carolina Fund (NC Fund), an antipoverty agency created by Governor Terry Sanford in 1963. The Fund became the model for President Johnson’s national reform agenda.

This book is about the politics of race and poverty in America. It tells the story of the North Carolina Fund, a pioneer effort to improve the lives of the “neglected and forgotten” poor in a nation that celebrated itself as an affluent society. Governor Terry Sanford created the Fund in 1963, at a time when the United States stood at a crossroads. A decade of civil rights activism had challenged the country to fulfill its promise of equality and opportunity. Not since the Civil War and Reconstruction had reformers raised such fundamental questions about the political and social foundations of the republic. It was, however, by no means clear how Americans would answer. Alabama governor George C. Wallace spoke for one possibility.