In 1908, on Parrish Street in Durham, North Carolina, a group of Black businessmen founded a bank. White-owned banks in Durham would not provide loans to Black residents, would not accept Black deposits on equal terms, and would not finance Black business ventures. The response of Durham’s Black community was not petition — it was construction. Mechanics and Farmers Bank opened for business with nine founders, including John Merrick, Aaron McDuffie Moore, Charles C. Spaulding, and Stanford L. Warren. It was a sister institution to the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, already operating on the same street. Together these two institutions formed the financial foundation of what W.E.B. Du Bois would call, after visiting in 1912, an unparalleled concentration of Black entrepreneurship. The four-block district on Parrish Street became known as Black Wall Street.
Durham’s Black Wall Street was not an accident. It was the deliberate creation of a community that understood, with great clarity, that economic independence was the prerequisite for every other form of freedom. John Merrick, who had been a barber to wealthy white Durham families, used his access and his savings to build the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company into the largest Black-owned insurance company in the United States. Charles C. Spaulding built it into a national institution. The businesses that clustered around North Carolina Mutual and Mechanics and Farmers Bank — real estate firms, law offices, newspapers, pharmacies, funeral homes — created a self-sustaining economic ecosystem that provided employment, capital, and services to Black Durham residents who were excluded from the white economy. Booker T. Washington visited in 1910 and wrote admiringly about what he found. W.E.B. Du Bois, who disagreed with Washington about almost everything, agreed that Durham was extraordinary.
Mechanics and Farmers Bank survived the Great Depression without closing — a distinction that very few banks of any kind could claim. It provided $200,000 in individual loans in the 1920s, saving more than 500 Black-owned farms and residences when white banks were calling in loans and forcing foreclosures. It financed Black homeownership, Black business expansion, and Black institution-building across North Carolina for decades. In 1952, John Hervey Wheeler became its president. Wheeler — a Morehouse College graduate, a lawyer, and the son of Stanford L. Warren, one of the bank’s co-founders — transformed M&F Bank from a community financial institution into an instrument of civil rights strategy. He understood that economic power and legal power were not separate tools but the same tool used in different contexts. Under his leadership the bank became, as one historian described it, the institutional base from which North Carolina’s most influential Black power broker operated.
John H. Wheeler’s civil rights record is inseparable from his role at Mechanics and Farmers Bank. He led legal challenges to school segregation in North Carolina, including cases that contributed to the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education. He argued the case of Frasier v. Board of Trustees, which desegregated the University of North Carolina. He was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to review Marshall Plan progress in Germany, served as a State Department consultant in Egypt and Syria, and chaired a White House Conference session titled “To Fulfill These Rights.” He used the bank’s financial position to support voter registration, to provide economic backing for civil rights organizing, and to give the Black community of Durham the institutional stability that direct action movements required. His son Warren Wheeler, founder of the first Black-owned airline in American history, grew up in a household where Black institution-building was not ideology but daily practice.
Mechanics and Farmers Bank still operates today — rebranded as M&F Bank in 2015, with $370 million in assets as of 2022, serving five cities across North Carolina. It is the oldest Black-owned bank in North Carolina and one of the oldest in the United States. The building on Parrish Street where it began still stands. Durham’s Black Wall Street was devastated in the 1960s when the construction of Highway 147 demolished 80 acres of the Hayti community, destroying over 120 Black businesses and displacing more than 500 families — an act of urban renewal that targeted Black economic districts across American cities in the name of progress. The highway was built. The businesses were gone. But Mechanics and Farmers Bank survived. It has been profitable every year since 1908. That is the record of what Black Americans built in Durham, North Carolina, when the white economy told them they did not belong.