Urban Renewal and the Prospects of a Free and Open Society

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.