April 6, 1972
John Merrick, who was born into slavery and became an entrepreneur, founded North Carolina Mutual in Durham in 1898. In his book Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, historian Walter Weare writes, “Next to the black church and the black college, the North Carolina Mutual remains one of the nation’s oldest and largest African-American institutions; and since the number of its policyholders and employees, past and present, would run into the millions, it probably touched the lives of more black Americans than any other single African-American institution.”102
The 1970s were a transition decade for North Carolina Mutual. “In the wake of the civil rights movement,” Weare writes, “the Company reaped an enormous harvest when socially conscious ‘Fortune 500’ corporations farmed out to the Mutual a percentage of their employee insurance. The overall infusion was so great as to stir speculation that the North Carolina Mutual might no longer be able to consider itself a black company. The white largese was short-lived, however. It dried up in the 1980s, along with the underlying social concern, leaving the Company in a bind, culturally as well as economically.”103