Oliver Harvey (labor organizer)

Oliver Harvey (1909-?) was an African American janitor at Duke University and founding president of the Local 77 chapter of American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO. He spearheaded the movement to unionize Duke University employees during the 1960s.

Early life

The son of a land-owning farmer, Oliver Harvey grew up in Franklinton, North Carolina, which was at the time dominated by the textile and tobacco industries.[1] When his father lost his land in 1933, Harvey moved to Durham, NC to find employment and worked a series of temporary jobs.[1] In 1936, he took a job at the American Tobacco Company, which was in the process of unionizing.[1] Refusing to join the union on account of its policy of segregation, Harvey was soon fired.[1] He subsequently worked as an assistant at Watts Hospital, and in 1943 began a job at the Krueger Bottling Company, which had been hiring African Americans because of the wartime labor shortage, and which had a segregated union.[2] Harvey helped initiate a strike in favor of desegregation, garnering the support of the company’s white employees.[2]

Duke University

After a brief stint running his own restaurant, Harvey in 1951 began working as a janitor at Duke University, where he soon began advocating for better wages and treatment of housekeeping staff.[2][3] In 1956 he made headlines when he and fellow Duke employee Beatrice Noore disobeyed a bus driver's orders to give up their seats to white students[4] and in 1960, he participated in a sit-in with North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University) students at Rose’s downtown department store in Durham.[5] Harvey also met with Martin Luther King, Jr. during King's 1964 visit to Duke University.[5]

In 1965, Harvey initiated the formation of the Duke University Employees Benevolent Society; after searching for a national union with which to affiliate, the DUEBS eventually chose the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, becoming the Local 77 chapter.[6][7][8][9] That year, the DUEBS delivered a petition to Duke President Douglas Knight demanding wage increases and benefits for the Duke housekeeping staff, issues remaining prominent in Duke University politics throughout the 1960s.[6][7]

In the early 1970s, Harvey was promoted to a supervisory position at Duke.[6][10] After he retired, he volunteered as an organizer for Duke University Medical Center; in 1978, he took a job with the AFSCME as a labor organizer, also in the DUMC.[6] Eventually he asked to be taken off the AFSCME payroll.[6]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 McConville, Ed (1978). "Oliver Harvey: Got to Take Some Risks," Southern Exposure, 6(2), 24.
  2. 1 2 3 McConville, "Oliver Harvey," 25.
  3. ↑ Sacks, Karen Brodkin, Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 40.
  4. ↑ Sacks, Caring by the Hour, 41
  5. 1 2 McConville, "Oliver Harvey," 27.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 McConville, "Oliver Harvey," 28.
  7. 1 2 "Duke Employees' Organizing Efforts," Herald-Sun, 24 August 2013.
  8. ↑ Greene, Christina, Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 106
  9. ↑ Dunbar, Tony, "The Old South Triumphs at Duke," Southern Changes 1(9), 5
  10. ↑ Sacks, Caring by the Hour, 56.
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