Oliver Harvey (labor organizer)

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]

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]