Restrictions to Access

No restrictions. Open for research.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Raymond Wheeler papers #4366, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from Julie Wheeler, Charlotte, North Carolina in October 1983.

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Processed by: Laura K. O'Keefe, June 1984

Encoded by: ByteManagers Inc., 2008

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Charlotte Citizen Action Team (Charlotte, N.C.)
• Malnutrition--Southern States--History--20th century.
• National Sharecroppers' Fund (U.S.)
• North Carolina Civil Liberties Union.
• North Carolina Hunger Coalition.
• North Carolina--Social conditions.
• Social problems--Societies, etc.
• Social reformers--North Carolina.
• Soldiers--United States--Correspondence.
• Southern Regional Council.
• Wheeler, Raymond, 1919-1982.

• Coles, Robert (#4333). Coles was one of six physicians, including Wheeler, who studied poverty and malnutrition in the South in 1967.
• Dabbs, James McBride (#3816). Dabbs and Wright were successive presidents of the Southern Regional Council and friends of Wheeler. Wright, Marion Allen (#3830).

Raymond Milner Wheeler was born on 30 September 1919, in Farmville, North Carolina. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1939, and his M.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1943. After serving as a captain in the Army Medical Corps in World War II, Wheeler returned to North Carolina, entering private practice in internal medicine in Charlotte in 1948.

First married in 1942 to Mary Lou Browning, Wheeler was divorced in 1956. He married Julie Buckner Carr in 1958.

In 1956, Wheeler joined the Southern Regional Council, an organization that had grown out of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. He served as chairman of its Executive Committee from 1964-1969, and as president from 1969 to 1974.

Wheeler was one of a team of six doctors who participated in a field study of health and living conditions of black children in two rural Mississippi counties in 1967. The team later testified before the U.S. Senate's Employment, Manpower, and Poverty Subcommittee, describing the severe cases of lack of health care, malnutrition, and near starvation that they had seen. Wheeler's testimony, which was among the most eloquent and the most frequently quoted in the national press, brought him both fan mail and hate mail (folder 38). Hungry Children, the report from that field study (folder 47), published by the SRC, was the basis for a 1968 documentary by CBS, Hunger in America.

Wheeler was also active in a number of Charlotte-based organizations, including the Charlotte Citizen Action Team, a group concerned with growth and development in Charlotte; and with the Charlotte Human Relations Council. As a physician, he worked vigorously for improved conditions in Charlotte Memorial Hospital, and for community health centers aimed specifically at meeting the needs of lower-income people.

His ongoing concern for the welfare of the rural poor also led Wheeler to investigate living conditions of migrant workers in camps in Florida and Texas during the late 1960s and mid-1970s. He served as president of the North Carolina Hunger Coalition from 1974 to 1979. He chaired the Executive Committee of the National Sharecropper's Fund from 1976 to 1978 and was its president from 1978 until his death on 17 February 1982.

Most of the material in the Raymond Wheeler Papers pertains to the social justice activities in which Wheeler took part, from the mid-1950s to 1982. Letters, informational bulletins, clippings, and texts of speeches are among the items that document Wheeler's testimony on hunger in America before various Congressional committees and his involvement with such organizations as the Southern Regional Council, the National Sharecropper's Fund, the North Carolina Hunger Coalition, the North Carolina Civil Liberties Union, and the Charlotte Citizen Action Team. Aside from letters Wheeler wrote to his parents during World War II, there is very little of a personal nature in this collection.

The papers are arranged in four series: (1) General Subject Files; (2) Southern Regional Council; (3) National Sharecropper's Fund/Rural Advancement Fund; and (4) Pictures. The arrangement of the first series is consistent with Wheeler's own organization of his files, with some minor changes and additions to improve access. The series descriptions and folder lists which follow provide more detailed information.

• P-4366/1-10