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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 chapter discusses the founding of Craven Operation Progress (COP) and the broad and enthusiastic support it received from the North Carolina Fund, its first funding agency. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act in August 1964 critical antipoverty plans and programs for Craven County and nearby counties had been under way for more than half a year. These included a strawberry marketing program, a rural environmental sanitation program, adult basic education classes, and manpower training. From the very beginning, plans and incentives to combat the causes of poverty in Eastern North Carolina did not await direction or guidance from the federal government but grew instead out of local needs and circumstances.

This chapter focuses on Susie Powell, a native of Whitakers, a small town in eastern North Carolina, and a student at Bennett College, who scribbled a brief note in her diary. She was one of a group of student volunteers selected by the North Carolina Fund as foot soldiers in the battle against poverty. Powell and her compatriots in the North Carolina Volunteers, dubbed the “First One Hundred” by the state's press, had just finished a three-day orientation at Duke University. They had spent their days in classrooms, listening to professors and public officials describe to them the poor and the causes of poverty, and in the evenings they had discussed with a mix of excitement and apprehension the work that lay ahead.

This chapter focuses on a time when the North Carolina Fund was riding high. George Esser and his staff looked to the future with confidence and a deep sense of satisfaction. When representatives of the Ford Foundation reviewed the Fund in late 1966, they heaped praise on the agency's efforts. In less than three years, it had “helped initiate and finance innovative, experimental projects . . . to better educate the young and give job skills to unemployed adults, to improve health and sanitation in backward communities . . . to initiate farm coops, and to begin imaginative projects organizing domestic workers, establishing day care centers . . . training and developing indigenous leaders, and a host of other activities, indispensable to ending poverty.” Even so, the Ford team noted, there was much work yet to be done.

This chapter discusses the North Carolina Fund's considerable success in organizing the black poor in Durham and the Choanoke region. However, the fact remained that a majority of the poor—in North Carolina and the nation—were white. From the outset, the architects of the War on Poverty had wanted desperately to include that constituency. One reason was practical: the sheer number of poor whites meant that their participation in a campaign against poverty would yield the greatest returns in the form of economic development and value added to human capital. Another reason was decidedly tactical: Lyndon Johnson and allies such as Terry Sanford knew that the War on Poverty would fail if it became too closely identified with the black freedom struggle. In hopes of holding on to conservative southern Democrats, Johnson distanced himself from the agenda of civil rights and characterized his assault on poverty as a means of creating “opportunity for all.”

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.

This chapter discusses the increased intervention from the Office of Economic Opportunity and the North Carolina Fund in Craven Operation Progress matters. Federal officials within both the OEO and the Department of Labor had begun to conclude, similarly to Fund staff, that local control of community action would never allow the types of social and institutional change they believed were necessary to meet the needs of the poor. From their perspective in Washington, D.C., too many businessmen, elected officials, and other power-structure types served on local boards. Moreover, these men and women were either incapable of making or unwilling to make the kinds of decisions likely to enhance the poor’s political influence or economic standing. Eventually, save for the rare instances in which the poor made up a majority of a Community Action Agency board, local community action experiments began to be seen as a roadblock to the War on Poverty’s goals of improving opportunities and justice for indigent populations (especially in the South, where many of the long-term poor were black). The executive director ultimately resigns following pressure from both groups to step down.

This chapter introduces Craven Operation Progress’s new executive director who desired to ensure more poor people were reached, especially the white poor who were participating in very low numbers. A moderate compared to the previous director, he also sought to cooperate more with the local people and move COP in a less controversial direction. North Carolina Fund and Office of Economic Opportunity leaders generally distrusted the new director and believed he was too accommodating to the local power structure at the expense of those being served by COP. Yet despite such criticisms, some of COP’s greatest successes begin to show during Monte’s tenure, particularly within the Manpower training program. This chapter also details how black and whites on the COP board generally see the need to cooperate and work together for the sake of the community.