Soul City

by Thomas Healy

  Racism wasn’t as pronounced in Asheville as elsewhere in the South. White residents liked to boast that slavery had never existed in their town. That was a fiction: although the mountainous terrain made plantations impractical, most businessmen and professionals had kept at least one person in slavery, and by 1850 enslaved people made up 13 percent of the town’s population. But unlike other areas of the South, Asheville’s economy had not been built on slavery, so its support for secession had been lukewarm and its response to emancipation subdued. Asheville was also less physically segregated than many other southern communities. Instead of being confined to one or two neighborhoods, Black residents were scattered in pockets across town, the better to serve their white bosses. The McKissick home on Magnolia Street straddled one of these pockets, so that all their front-yard neighbors were Black and all their backyard neighbors were white.

  Still, race was a defining fact of life in Asheville. And although McKissick had a happy childhood, he was continually reminded of the lesson he had learned on the trolley years before: he was a Black boy in a white land. It was a lesson he resented when he and his sisters visited their father at the hotel where he worked and were told to wait in a back room. A lesson he recoiled from when word spread that a white girl in the neighborhood had kissed him and her family was forced to move. And a lesson he rebelled against when he was turned away from the soapbox derby because of his skin color, only to sneak in anyway and finish in first place.

  If these insults made clear to McKissick where he stood in American society, it was an incident several years later that persuaded him what to do about it. He was thirteen at the time, a member of a Black Boy Scout troop that was sponsoring a skating competition on French Broad Avenue, a gently sloping street near downtown. As one of the troop’s best skaters, he was assigned to stand guard at the starting line and look after the younger kids. Wearing his uniform and a pair of metal skates strapped to his shoes, he was corralling the racers behind the line when one of them drifted into an adjoining street. McKissick darted out to catch the boy, and as he skated back to the starting line two policemen rode up on motorcycles and berated him. When he tried to explain what had happened, one of the officers became enraged. Removing a heavy glove and gripping it by the fingers, he slapped McKissick twice across the face, knocking him to the ground. “Don’t talk back to me,” he barked before ordering McKissick to take off his skates. As McKissick pulled at the straps, he tried once more to explain and looked for an adult to confirm his story. The officer slapped him again and pulled out his nightstick. Before he could strike, McKissick removed his skate and swung it hard, knocking the baton out of the officer’s hand. “You crazy black son of a bitch,” the officer shouted. “Now I’ll kill you.” By this time, one of the scoutmasters saw what was happening and rushed over, pleading with the officer. “He’s just a kid. He don’t know no better.” Soon other officers arrived to defuse the situation, and McKissick was handcuffed and taken to the police station.

  He was met there by his father and a group of Black leaders who had heard about the incident and hurried to the station. The police threatened to throw McKissick in jail, but the leaders persuaded them to release the boy into his father’s custody until trial. Two weeks later, McKissick appeared in court with his parents and the same group of Black men. One of them was a prominent minister who apologized on McKissick’s behalf and begged the judge for mercy. McKissick’s father also spoke, telling the judge (falsely) that he had already punished his son and would keep him out of trouble. The judge was swayed. Advising the elder McKissick to give his son a good thrashing, he dismissed the case and sent the boy home.

  Prior to that moment, McKissick had planned to become a preacher, like his grandfathers on both sides; he had even promised his maternal grandfather he would follow in his footsteps. But the skating incident showed him the power of law and, more specifically, of lawyers. He saw that preachers had no authority; they could only beg and plead with white judges and prosecutors, who called them “boy” and made jokes at their expense. To be truly protected, one needed a lawyer. Lawyers were given respect and a voice within the system. But there were no Black lawyers in Asheville, and most white lawyers wouldn’t represent Black clients. So McKissick decided he would become a lawyer and use the law to protect himself and the members of his race.

  The skating incident also turned him into an activist. Although the judge warned him to watch his step, he could no longer ignore the injustices he saw. The day after his trial, a librarian at school handed him a copy of The Crisis, the magazine published by the NAACP. That same week he became a member of the organization. Soon, he was working with an NAACP investigator to document lynchings in the eastern part of the state. And several years later, when Asheville officials denied the actor and activist Paul Robeson a permit to speak at a public auditorium, McKissick joined a delegation to protest the decision before the city council. The protest failed, but McKissick emerged as the group’s leader, proving that the trolley conductor had been right after all: he was going to get into a hell of a lot of trouble.

  * * *

  MCKISSICK LEFT ASHEVILLE in 1940 to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta. He was in his sophomore year when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and he enlisted in the army a month later. Despite a recruiter’s promise that he could join the Army Air Forces, he was sent to the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center at Fort Bragg, where, because of his college background, he was assigned to teach math to white soldiers. From there, he was sent to the Thirteenth Engineer Special Brigade, which supported the tank divisions of the US Third Army, commanded by General George Patton. McKissick saw action in the battles of Metz and Rouen and was part of the Third Army’s final push into Germany. During one engagement, he was hit in the head with shrapnel, for which he received a Purple Heart.

  But the experience that affected him most came after the war, in French villages that had been destroyed by shells and aerial bombing. In the towns of Lille, Tourcoing, and Roubaix, along the Belgian border, McKissick and his unit helped clear rubble, pave streets, and repair town squares. And as he watched French engineers and planners slowly put their cities back together, he wondered why Black people couldn’t do the same thing back home. “If we can spend all this time over in Europe building, we can sure go back down South and build,” he told friends and relatives when he returned to the States in December 1946. But the reality of life at home made clear that his dream would have to wait. Although Blacks had played a critical role in the war, their status in America was unchanged. They were still discriminated against in jobs and public accommodations, still sent to segregated schools, still turned away at the polls. The likelihood that Congress would invest in new cities built by Blacks was next to zero.

  McKissick and his wife, Evelyn, shortly after they were married in 1942.

  Besides, by that point McKissick was married, with two young daughters to support. So he put aside his dream and returned to Morehouse to complete his degree. Now even more committed to racial justice, he joined the newly formed Progressive Party and campaigned for its candidate, Henry Wallace, in the 1948 presidential election. He also got his first taste of nonviolent direct action, taking part in the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. Organized by a fledgling civil rights group called the Congress of Racial Equality, the journey was designed to test a recent Supreme Court ruling that states could not require segregated seating on interstate bus routes. For two weeks, Black and white activists rode Greyhound and Trailways buses through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, defying demands that they separate. McKissick joined the group in Chapel Hill, then traveled to Asheville, Knoxville, and Washington, DC. The journey was dangerous and harrowing. In one town, a group of taxi drivers attacked the riders, then pursued them to the home of a local minister. At other stops, riders were taunted, harassed, and arrested. But the journey showed the power of nonviolent resistance and would serve as the model for a series of more famous bus rides fourte
en years later.

  After finishing at Morehouse in 1948 (the same year as King, who was seven years younger and thus avoided the war), McKissick enrolled at North Carolina College School of Law, an all-Black institution the state had opened to avoid integrating the University of North Carolina. There, he led protests demanding equal funding and the repeal of trespass statutes being used to thwart civil rights demonstrations. He also became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging segregation at UNC. Litigated by Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, the case ended up in the federal appeals court in Richmond, which ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. McKissick had already earned enough credits to graduate, but he enrolled in UNC summer classes anyway and left his family to live in a dorm on campus. His classmates were not kind. They hid snakes in his bed, poured water on his clothes, and knocked over his tray in the cafeteria. McKissick, as usual, fought back. After his tray was knocked over for the third time, he announced loudly that he wouldn’t let it happen again (it didn’t). And when he heard that the campus swimming pool was still segregated, he jumped in with his clothes on and declared, “It’s integrated now.”

  With his law degree in hand, McKissick opened an office on Main Street in Durham. Like any young lawyer, he took whatever work came his way—property disputes, insurance claims, criminal defense. But his focus was civil rights law, and over the next decade he took on hundreds of cases challenging segregation and defending the right of peaceful protest. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, he and his wife, Evelyn, filed suit to integrate the Durham public schools. The city prevailed on a technicality but, sensing the inevitable, it permitted a small number of Black students, including McKissick’s two oldest children, to attend white schools in the fall of 1959. For the children, Joycelyn and Andree, it was a costly victory. Like their father, they faced the wrath of classmates, who cut patches out of their hair, spilled ink on their dresses, and doused their heads with cold water. But that was life as a McKissick, which blurred the line between family and the movement. Their modest frame house was not just a home; it was a staging ground for protests, a gathering spot for Black leaders, and a guesthouse for activists. At any moment, the children might be called upon to march, boycott, or go to jail (Joycelyn once spent a month behind bars rather than pay a fifty-dollar fine). They were also accustomed to the threats their father received by phone and mail. They would often come home from school to find a group of men on the porch, guarding the house with guns. And whenever they ate at a restaurant, they noticed that their father, like many Black leaders, never sat with his back to the door.

  By the end of the 1950s, McKissick had become a controversial figure, hailed by some, despised by others. But his career in the spotlight was just beginning.

  • 2 •

  Scrambled Egg

  The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56 is generally considered the start of the modern civil rights movement, and for good reason. It was the first time Black people successfully mobilized en masse to break the grip of Jim Crow. It was also the episode that thrust Martin Luther King Jr. onto the national stage, as he led the yearlong protest against segregation on the city’s buses. But if one had to point to another moment that was equally important in launching the Black freedom struggle, it would be the Greensboro sit-in of 1960. Like the Montgomery boycott, the sit-in employed nonviolent direct action to protest segregation, this time at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. But whereas the boycott was limited to Montgomery, the Greensboro sit-in spread quickly to other cities. Moreover, the sit-in was not the work of professional activists or community leaders. It was initiated by four unknown college students, thus foreshadowing the central role young people would play in guiding the movement over the next decade.

  The Greensboro sit-in marked a turning point for McKissick, too. Prior to that moment, he had been mostly a statewide figure, serving as youth director for the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. But the sit-in introduced him to a broader, national audience. It also cemented his ties to the Congress of Racial Equality. Founded in Chicago in 1942, CORE was not the oldest of the major civil rights groups; both the NAACP (established in 1909) and the National Urban League (1910) were older. But those groups operated mainly through institutional mechanisms—the NAACP through lobbying and the courts, the Urban League through politics and corporate networking. CORE was the first civil rights group to rely primarily on direct action—the challenging of racial discrimination through protests, boycotts, marches, and other forms of nonviolent resistance. CORE’s roots also set it apart. An offshoot of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian pacifist organization, it was for many years dominated by whites. Their goal was to abolish the color line, and early efforts were promising. In 1942, CORE integrated the Jack Spratt Coffee House in Chicago. Four years later, it ended the exclusion of Black skaters from the White City Roller Skating Rink.

  After those initial victories, CORE floundered. Unlike the NAACP, which had a strong central office that organized national campaigns, CORE was a federation of autonomous chapters that shared a common philosophy but pursued their own projects. This limited the group’s impact, since the chapters were only as effective as the people running them. CORE was also hindered by the red-baiting of the McCarthy era. Although it officially disavowed communism, several of its early leaders had links to communist groups, which scared away potential members. But as McCarthyism cooled down and the civil rights movement heated up in the wake of the Montgomery boycott, CORE regained its early momentum. It appointed an executive secretary to impose order on the organization, increased its fundraising, and expanded the number of chapters. It also hired a field secretary, a white activist named Gordon Carey who began looking for a way to boost CORE’s national profile.

  He found it the first week of February 1960. Three days after the start of the Greensboro sit-in, a local dentist mailed a postcard to the CORE office in New York seeking assistance on the students’ behalf. Carey read the card and persuaded his superiors to send him to Greensboro. On the bus ride south, he learned that the demonstrations had moved to Durham and changed his destination. Arriving in the Bull City on February 7, he joined a sit-in the next day at a downtown lunch counter with a group of Black students. Police left the students alone but grabbed Carey by the collar and marched him down the street to jail. And the man who bailed him out a few hours later, waving a pocket copy of the Constitution, was Floyd McKissick.

  Over the next few months, Carey and McKissick became close friends as they traveled the state together, training students in nonviolent protest, organizing sit-ins, and speaking at mass rallies alongside King. It was a heady time, especially for Carey, who was labeled an outside agitator and hounded by the media. As he put it in a letter to his bosses, “I can’t move without the press covering my movement.” But their courage and hard work paid off. The sit-ins spread rapidly, encompassing thirteen states and more than seventy thousand protesters. And though many groups played a part, CORE suddenly found itself at the center of the action.

  The organization took off from there, appointing a Black activist named James Farmer as national director and finding new ways to dramatize the injustices of Jim Crow. It initiated boycotts against segregated stores and restaurants, fought discrimination in employment and housing, and pioneered the “jail-in,” a strategy in which protesters stayed behind bars rather than post bail. But its most successful campaign came out of its past, and it was conceived, in part, by Carey. Traveling from South Carolina to New York in February 1961, he and another CORE staffer named Tom Gaither became stranded on the New Jersey Turnpike for twelve hours when their bus got caught in a snowstorm. Sitting on the bus with nothing to do, Carey pulled out a biography of Mahatma Gandhi and read about his famous march to the sea to protest the British salt monopoly. As Carey and Gaither discussed the march, they wondered whether a similar demonstration could be organized in the South. They knew about a recent Supreme Court decision
barring segregation not only on interstate buses and trains but in stations and terminals as well. And they knew about CORE’s 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, which McKissick had participated in. So they decided to reenact the earlier journey with the goal of enforcing the Supreme Court’s new ruling. And this time they came up with a catchier name: the Freedom Rides.

  Launched that spring, the Freedom Rides propelled CORE to the forefront of the civil rights struggle. They also exposed a growing fissure within the movement. When the rides turned violent in Alabama, with white mobs firebombing one bus and brutally attacking riders on two others, moderates urged an end to the journey. At one point, King himself called for a halt, only to be overruled by more militant activists. Established groups also resented the attention CORE attracted with its confrontational tactics. While CORE got the credit and the glory, groups like the NAACP had to clean up afterward, raising money for bail and hiring lawyers to appear in court.

  McKissick had long worked with both organizations. But as tensions between the two groups escalated, he was forced to choose sides, and, believing that desperate measures were called for, he chose CORE. The decision paid off when he was elected chairman of the group’s National Action Council at the 1963 annual convention. The leading candidate had been Alan Gartner, a white activist who was head of the Boston chapter. But CORE’s membership had become increasingly Black and demanded that its leadership reflect that. So during a tearful and emotional meeting, Farmer convinced Gartner to withdraw from the race. Then, at Carey’s urging, he backed McKissick for the post.