Soul City

by Thomas Healy

  Nor can one overlook the self-defeating pride of McKissick himself. Determined that Soul City would be a monument to Black achievement, he sent contradictory messages about the racial makeup he desired. And although generally a pragmatist—as demonstrated by his alliance with Nixon—he was unwilling to compromise on the one aspect of the plan that may have doomed his dream: the town’s name.

  But my goal in telling the story of Soul City is not to assign blame. It is to understand the forces that led to its downfall and the lessons it offers for the pursuit of racial equality today. The need for these lessons is more urgent than ever. In the half century since McKissick launched Soul City, the financial gap between Black and white households has hardly budged. Blacks are still twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, while their median net worth is one-tenth that of whites. More importantly, they are still seeking the same self-determination McKissick hoped Soul City would provide in 1969. When protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, Black residents were not just lamenting the death of Michael Brown, the young man shot by a police officer. Although that incident triggered the unrest, the frustration and bitterness had been building in Ferguson for decades, as the percentage of Black residents increased but whites retained control of all aspects of city government. By 2014, Ferguson’s population was 67 percent Black and 30 percent white. Yet its government was staffed almost entirely by whites, from the mayor’s office to the school board to the police department, which had only three Black officers out of a force of fifty-three. What Black residents in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte, Minneapolis, and so many other cities are demanding today is the same thing McKissick was seeking five decades earlier: respect, dignity, and control over their own destiny.

  * * *

  SOUL CITY WAS one of the most ambitious and high-profile projects to emerge from the civil rights era. It was covered extensively by the local and national press, featured on NBC’s Today show, studied at Harvard Business School, and watched closely by university planning departments around the country. Yet in the decades after its demise, Soul City was almost completely forgotten. Every once in a while, a curious reporter or graduate student would sift through the archives and publish an article or thesis on Soul City. For the most part, however, it vanished from our collective memory. I have spoken to many historians and legal scholars who have studied the civil rights era and yet have never heard of Soul City. Its disappearance was so complete for so long that it seems almost intentional, as though the forces that conspired against Soul City were determined not merely to kill it but to erase it from history.

  McKissick’s effort deserves better. It deserves an honest reexamination and a prominent place in the history of the civil rights movement. In the popular imagination, that movement ended with Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. But once the protests and marches ended, there was still much work to be done. And Soul City was one man’s attempt to carry the dream forward.

  PART I

  • 1 •

  “Black Boy in a White Land”

  Where do we go from here?

  That was the question on everyone’s mind, and Floyd McKissick was certain he knew the answer.

  It was May 1968, one month after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. For thirteen years, ever since the Montgomery bus boycott, King had been the moral conscience and public face of the civil rights movement. He had taken on Bull Connor and his dogs in the Birmingham campaign, inspired the nation with his soaring rhetoric in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and led the historic march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery. His demand for freedom and integration had given the movement its sense of purpose, while his gospel of love and nonviolence had provided its strategic framework. The recipient of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, King had been the most influential Black man in America—perhaps the world. And although that influence had waned in recent years as a younger generation of activists embraced more militant and separatist agendas, King was still the closest thing to a unifying Black leader.

  Now he was gone, gunned down on the balcony of a Memphis motel, and the civil rights movement confronted an existential question: What next? The immediate response to King’s death had been grief and violence, with protests and riots breaking out in cities across the country. Already there had been nearly as many riots in 1968 as in any other year of the decade, itself the most tumultuous of the century. But the unrest was largely destructive, a way to release anger and frustration, not to chart a course forward. And as the fires burned out and the dust settled, the major civil rights organizations were debating which road to take and vying to show the way. Ralph Abernathy, who had assumed the reins of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, pledged to continue the Poor People’s Campaign begun earlier that year. Leading a group of three thousand demonstrators, he set up a tent city on the National Mall and demanded $30 billion in poverty relief and an economic bill of rights that would give every American a guaranteed income. Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, called for a “White People’s March” on the capital as a sign of interracial solidarity, while Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), pushed for new jobs legislation and an “Adopt a Cop” program to improve relations between Black people and the police. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, more radical than its counterparts, deleted the word “nonviolent” from its name, urged Blacks to take up arms in self-defense, and contemplated a merger with the revolutionary Black Panthers.

  The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) rounded out the “Big Five” civil rights groups, and it, too, was trying to determine the next step in the struggle for Black freedom. For McKissick, who had been elected national director two years earlier, the answer was clear, and in the second week of May he called a meeting of CORE’s National Action Council to share his vision.

  They gathered in east Baltimore, which just weeks earlier had witnessed one of the worst riots in the country. For eight days, the city’s Black neighborhoods had resembled a war zone, with residents smashing windows, looting stores, burning buildings, and throwing rocks and bottles at police and firemen. Cops in riot gear had marched through the streets, firing tear gas, exchanging shots with snipers, and rounding up lawbreakers and onlookers by the hundreds. When local officers proved unable to quell the violence, Governor Spiro Agnew declared a state of emergency and called up five thousand National Guardsmen, and when they, too, proved inadequate, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched five thousand soldiers to the area. It took more than a week and the arrest of six thousand people to restore order, and the final toll was devastating: six people dead, seven hundred wounded, and $12 million in property damage. Even now, as council members filed into the meeting, evidence of the riots was all around them: in boarded-up windows, burned-out storefronts, and the suspicious stares of newly armed shopkeepers.

  Inside, McKissick quickly got down to business. He began with a report he had drafted with the help of his assistant director, Roy Innis. Titled “A Nation Within a Nation,” the report argued that America was divided into two societies, one prosperous and white, the other impoverished and Black. A dam separated these two societies, and like all dams it held energy that could either create or destroy. The challenge was to channel that energy into a constructive program for the liberation of Black society. The prevailing approach had been to rely on government welfare, the report declared. But “handouts” were not the answer. Taxpayers disliked them because the recipients seemed ungrateful, while the recipients resented them because they offered no hope of permanent escape. Instead, the poor had to be given the same things everyone else wanted: jobs, opportunity, and control over their own destiny.

  To achieve these goals, McKissick called for a sweeping program of economic development and urban reconstruction. At its heart would be a network of community corporations—nonprofit entities owned and managed by local residents. Funded by government-backed loans, these co
rporations would finance the creation of local businesses and provide job training for the unemployed. They would also use tax incentives to entice white companies to build plants in minority neighborhoods, train residents to operate the plants, and then sell them to the community after recovering their costs. The community corporations would use the revenue generated by the plants to invest in local businesses and pay for social services, thus creating a self-sustaining economic model. It was an ambitious and innovative plan that combined elements of free enterprise and socialism. And with an estimated price tag of $1 billion, it was far more politically palatable than the $30 billion sought as part of the Poor People’s Campaign.

  But McKissick was not interested solely in urban reconstruction. In his view, the problems of the cities were inextricable from the problems of rural America. When the economies of rural areas collapsed, their residents poured into the cities in search of opportunity, which only exacerbated the overcrowding and destitution of the slums. Therefore, McKissick believed, it was vital to address rural poverty, too. And his proposal for doing so was even more ambitious than his program for urban renewal. Instead of simply providing subsidies to farmers or locating a few factories in the countryside, he wanted to build new cities across rural America. His proposal here was less detailed than his plan for community corporations. He didn’t say exactly how the land for such an undertaking might be acquired, though he indicated it might come from the federal government, which had plenty of surplus property. Nor did he explain how CORE might go about building new cities, though again he suggested that help might come from Washington, as well as from private foundations. If the details were lacking, however, McKissick’s passion for the idea was not, and his plea to the council was personal and poignant. “This is me,” he told the thirty or so members gathered that day. “This is what I believe in. This is what I’m willing to risk my life for, the same as I did when I led demonstrations.”

  The council’s reaction was tepid. Some members were intrigued by McKissick’s proposal, believing that new cities, built and run by Black people, could improve conditions in urban and rural areas. But they were skeptical of CORE’s ability to acquire the land and assemble the staff necessary for such an ambitious venture. Others thought the whole plan too conservative, since it involved working within existing political and capital structures rather than overthrowing them. Still others were resistant to the entire economic thrust of McKissick’s program, insisting that CORE should stick to its traditional methods of direct action and community organizing. The debate was long and tedious, reflecting a growing rift between the radical and traditional factions of CORE. And in the end, that rift doomed McKissick’s plan. Although the council accepted his proposal for community corporations, it rejected what he viewed as the heart and soul of the program—the building of new cities.

  Innis was furious. A month earlier, his thirteen-year-old son had been shot dead while playing on the streets of the Bronx, a tragic reminder of just how dangerous the cities had become. Venting his grief, he laid into the council members with a barrage of profanity. They were getting bogged down in details, he told them. They should put aside their differences and give McKissick the freedom to move forward in a bold new direction. McKissick was angry, too, but more than anything he was disappointed. The council had not just rejected a plan; it had rejected his dream. And if he couldn’t pursue that dream at CORE, he knew he would have to leave. “I have never been one who wanted to be head of an organization that was not going in the direction I wanted to go,” he explained later. He informed the council he would step down as national director as soon as it could find a replacement. The council, caught off guard by this news, did not respond at once. But three weeks later, at a meeting in Cleveland, it privately accepted his resignation. Then, as word of the shake-up began to leak, the council announced publicly that McKissick was stepping down and that Innis would take over temporarily, until a new leader could be found.

  * * *

  MCKISSICK’S PRESENTATION TO the National Action Council was the first time he had formally pitched his idea of building new cities to promote economic equality. But the notion was far from new. In McKissick’s telling, he had been thinking about it since 1945, when his army unit helped rebuild ravaged villages in northeastern France. If entire towns could be reconstructed in postwar Europe, he thought to himself, why couldn’t Black people build new cities in the United States? Dreams are mysterious things, however, rarely emerging fully formed at a given moment in time. So although McKissick’s dream may have taken shape at the end of World War II, its roots—the motivation and impulses behind it—can be traced to events further back in his life.

  “Black, first. American, second.” That is the opening line of the autobiography McKissick began at one point and never finished, and its meaning is clear. From his earliest days growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, he was aware that his skin color mattered more than his nationality.

  Well, not exactly his earliest days. For a precious few years, McKissick had been oblivious to race, like the Zora Neale Hurston character who doesn’t realize she’s Black until the age of six, when she sees a picture of herself with a group of white children and wonders who that “dark chile” is where she’s supposed to be. “Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!” she blurts out in astonishment. For McKissick, the realization came sooner, and in a more crushing way.

  It happened in 1926, when he was four years old and riding the trolley with his aunt. He had never been on the trolley before, and as he climbed the steps he saw the conductor talking to two white boys, showing them how he operated the car. McKissick’s aunt dropped her coin in the slot and walked to the rear, but he stayed up front, hoping to hear what the conductor said. When the man saw him standing there, he erupted in anger, ordering McKissick to get his “black ass” to the back of the car. McKissick, unaware that the conductor was talking to him, pointed to a handle and asked, “What’s that?” to which the conductor replied by again ordering him to the back. Then, glaring down the aisle toward McKissick’s aunt, he yelled, “Negress, you better come up here and get your black son of a bitch and take him back there with you.” And as his aunt grabbed McKissick, half pulling, half guiding him to the rear of the trolley, the conductor added, “You’d better teach that boy some manners or he’s going to get into a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  It was a small incident in some ways, the kind that was repeated every day in trolleys and buses across the Jim Crow South. But for McKissick, it was devastating. He saw the hatred on the conductor’s red face, the white boys laughing at him, the tears running down his aunt’s cheeks. “What did I do wrong?” he asked her in confusion. She just told him to hush, then reached into her purse for a handkerchief, kissed him softly on the head, and said, “One day, you’ll understand.”

  Just as important as the incident on the trolley was what happened afterward, when he arrived home. His parents, aunt, and uncle gathered around him in the living room of their small house and told him over and over how much they loved him. “Just because you are black don’t mean your people don’t love you,” they said. “They do love you and you ought to be able to do what anybody else can. You ought to be able to watch the trolley man work, but you will find that there are a whole lot of mean white people in this world.” Later that afternoon, helping his father in the garden, he asked if all white people were mean. What about the man he had been named after, Floyd S. Bixler, a white merchant from Pennsylvania whom his father had met while working as a bellhop at the Battery Park Hotel and who had sent the family boxes of clothing, sheets, and towels every few months for a decade? Was he mean? No, his father replied. “He is an entirely different man, and as you grow older you will find out that there are two kinds of white people, good white people and bad white people. But there are a whole lot more bad white people than there are good.”

  McKissick never forgot that day. It was the day he first experienced the “double consciousness” W. E. B. Du Bois had
described twenty-three years earlier, in The Souls of Black Folk. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness,” Du Bois observed. “One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” Or, as McKissick put it in his autobiography, it was the day he learned he wasn’t just a boy. He was a Black boy—“a black boy in a white land. And just by being alive, by getting born, I had inherited a world that hated me—a whole bunch of mean people I never saw, but who were waiting there to tell me, ‘Get your black ass to the back.’”

  Childhood was not all harsh lessons and bitter reality. As McKissick also wrote, “You can’t be black full-time. Not as a child. The woods are green, even for Negroes.” And for a Negro boy in the 1920s, Asheville was, all things considered, a surprisingly green wood. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, it was a small, close-knit community where everyone knew everyone; when Thomas Wolfe published his autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel, in 1929, even McKissick’s parents recognized many of its characters. The second of four children and the only boy, McKissick was a rambunctious, sociable child who spent most days outside, roller skating down the city’s treacherous hills, swimming in the creek that ran near his house, or fishing in the French Broad River. On weekends, he played baseball in Stumptown, a Black neighborhood where all the trees had been chopped down. And at night, he and his friends gathered in a grove across from his house and took part in that ancient boyhood ritual of insulting one another’s mothers.

  Within this world, McKissick was a leader, an instigator, and a prankster, the kind of boy who would run behind a peach truck, lower the tailgate, and catch the peaches as they rolled off. But mostly he was a hustler, in the best sense of the word. At various points growing up he worked as a busboy, a waiter, a bellhop, a window washer, and a field hand. He shined shoes and raked leaves, sold soft drinks and newspapers. In the fall, he would hike into the hills to pick apples and chestnuts, and on hot summer days he would buy a fifty-pound block of ice and pull it around the neighborhood in a wagon, selling it off chunk by chunk before it melted. His best customer was a bootlegger named Charlie Brown who lived next door. When a new batch of liquor arrived, Brown would tell McKissick to fetch some peaches to give it flavor. Then when the customers showed up, McKissick would bring ice for their drinks and fish to make sandwiches.