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] 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][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.