Coming home to give back: Wheeler Scholarship rooted in Edgecombe County family
Every spring, Linwood Hinton travels across the country back to North Edgecombe High School, his alma mater.
Hinton, a Marine Corps Master Sergeant stationed in California, makes the trip as part of a scholarship fund he co-founded with his cousin, Jamaal Pittman, through the North Carolina Community Foundation.
Since its establishment in 2021, the Annie and Sallie Ann Wheeler Memorial Scholarship Endowment has awarded $25,000 to North Edgecombe seniors pursuing higher education. The scholarship honors the sisters Annie and Sallie Ann Wheeler, the two great-aunts who helped raise Hinton and Pittman in the small town of Leggett and were widely known locally for the support they provided to generations of children.
“Those women were so powerful and so strong to have so little, but you just never saw it,” Hinton said.
Annie worked in the tobacco fields as a sharecropper. Sallie Ann lived with polio from an early age but spent decades working as a domestic worker and helping raise children across the community. Neither had extensive formal education, but both recognized the value of learning and the importance of creating opportunities for young people.
“Everyone here knew them, from just being like that local-town mom or auntie figure to just everyone that was in the neighborhood,” Hinton said.
Hinton moved into their home at age seven and stayed through high school, first living with both women and later primarily with Sallie Ann after Annie’s passing.
“I consider her like another mom,” Hinton said of Sallie Ann. “She watched me grow up, taught me a lot, taught me just about being a good person.”
Years later, Hinton and Pittman reconnected over memories of the women who had shaped their lives. Those conversations eventually turned into action. “We had to find a way to keep their legacy alive and honor their name,” Hinton said.
Pittman began researching ways to create a lasting tribute, with the cousins settling on an endowed scholarship at NCCF supporting North Edgecombe students.
Pittman has taken on much of the behind-the-scenes work to sustain the scholarship, including fundraising and ongoing coordination with North Edgecombe High School from California.
“NCCF seemed to align with what we were looking for, something that was professionally managed, trustworthy, but also had those values of service and giving back and community. For us, coming from such a rural area in a small town and seeing that from the foundation, it just speaks out to us.”
Linwood Hinton, Wheeler Scholarship co-founder
The scholarship’s impact is already visible. The inaugural recipient, QuaNasia Bryant, recently graduated from NC A&T State University.
This year, North Edgecombe senior Khamaria Wolfe received a record $9,000 award and will attend Howard University this fall. “That’s cool that they came back and gave back to their community and the students here,” said Wolfe, referring to the scholarship’s co-founders. “And that just made me really want to apply because that’s something I want to do too in my future.”
For Hinton and Pittman, the scholarship is designed to carry forward the values Annie and Sallie Ann instilled in them decades ago.
“It’s having that young woman or that young man walking across that stage know that you’re from here,” he said, “but that you can also reach back and help the next generation.”