Wheeler, Raymond, 1919-1982

Raymond Wheeler of Charlotte, N.C., was an internist, civil rights activist, and advocate of better health care and nutrition for the poor, especially in the South.

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.