Soul City

by Thomas Healy

  Black leaders had also long recognized the leverage that economics gave them when demanding equal treatment. It was not the moral argument for integration that won the day after Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the front of a bus; it was the financial pain inflicted on Montgomery when Black residents boycotted the city’s transit system. Likewise, private businesses such as Woolworth’s and Howard Johnsons had reversed their policies primarily because of the economic pressure exerted by sit-ins, boycotts, and “buy black” campaigns.

  Yet many of the most visible triumphs of the civil rights movement had not moved the needle on economic equality. As McKissick liked to say, what good was the right to sit at a lunch counter if you didn’t have the bread to buy a burger? And Blacks still had far less bread than whites. In 1968, 29 percent of Black families fell below the poverty line, compared to 8 percent of white families. The median income of white families was $8,900, while for Black families it was $5,400. The unemployment rate of Blacks was double that of whites. The numbers went on and on, but as McKissick argued, “reciting the statistics of poverty is a sterile pursuit. Infant mortality, substandard housing, malnutrition—these are the polite terms of social scientists that blur the fact that babies are dying, families are crowded into rat-infested slums, and children are hungry.” To make matters worse, school desegregation had largely stalled. In 1968, fourteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, 77 percent of Black students still attended segregated schools.

  From the perspective of many Black leaders, then, the civil rights movement had been a double disappointment. Not only had it failed to achieve integration, it had done little to help Black people economically. By the mid-1960s, many Black leaders were responding to this reality. Even King, the civil rights leader most closely associated with integration, shifted his priorities, announcing the Poor People’s Campaign in late 1967. And of course the reason King was in Memphis when he was shot at the Lorraine Motel was to support a strike by Black sanitation workers.

  But no Black leader emphasized economic equality more than McKissick. The question was how to achieve it. McKissick knew that whites would never voluntarily give up their wealth and property. He also doubted that welfare could bring about systemic change (though he did support it as a means of temporary relief). If Black Americans were to achieve economic parity, McKissick believed, they would have to do so through the established mechanisms for accruing wealth. They would have to become entrepreneurs and businessmen, leveraging a system that had been used to exploit them into one that enriched them. In short, they would have to embrace capitalism, or, as it soon became known, “black capitalism.”

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  MCKISSICK DIDN’T LIKE the term “black capitalism.” He preferred “black entrepreneurialism,” or even “black socialism,” believing those terms better captured the combination of wealth accumulation and redistribution he had in mind. But whatever the label, the drive to promote Black business emerged as a central front in the battle for racial equality. At the 1967 Black Power Conference in Newark, the organizers issued a statement demanding that Black citizens get a “fair share of American capitalism.” The next year’s conference, in Philadelphia, was sponsored by Clairol, whose president was a leading proponent of Black capitalism. Meanwhile, Black businesses sprang up across the country. In Miami, Muhammad Ali opened his ChampBurger quick-service restaurant. In Los Angeles, two civil rights activists launched Shindana Toys, the first company to mass-produce Black dolls. And in North Philadelphia, the developer Leon Sullivan began construction on Progress Plaza, the first shopping mall in the country owned and operated by a Black man.

  Black activists and businessmen weren’t the only ones promoting Black capitalism. White philanthropists such as Henry Ford II and David Rockefeller endorsed the concept, believing it was key to solving the urban crisis. The conservative columnists Robert Novak and Rowland Evans were also sympathetic. Describing CORE’s push for Black economic independence, they noted that it implied a degree of separatism “that makes white liberals still yearning for immediate racial integration heartsick.” But, they added, “it strikes a responsive chord for Negro militants and has the indispensable virtue of attainability.”

  Perhaps the most surprising supporter of Black capitalism was Richard Nixon. In a campaign speech in April 1968, he argued that the rhetoric of Black capitalism had more in common with Republican values than Democratic ones. “Much of the black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist thirties,” he declared in his “Bridges to Human Dignity” speech. “What most of the militants are asking is … to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is precisely what the central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be oriented toward more black ownership, for from this can flow the rest—black pride, black jobs, black opportunity, and yes, black power, in the best, the constructive sense of that often misapplied term.”

  As many pundits observed, this sounded a lot like the rhetoric of McKissick and his assistant director, Roy Innis. Some commentators even accused Nixon of cribbing from CORE’s press releases. Instead of being angered, however, McKissick and Innis were intrigued. So when a Nixon aide offered to set up a meeting with the candidate, they accepted. The meeting took place in early May, at Nixon’s Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. According to a letter written by one of his advisers, Nixon agreed to support CORE’s effort to pass legislation giving Black residents control over their own communities. He instructed two aides to help Innis draft the bill, then directed his law firm to provide technical assistance. And when the measure, known as the Community Self-Determination Act, was introduced in Congress that summer, Nixon privately encouraged Republican legislators to vote for it. (The act was defeated by large margins in both houses.)

  Despite the widespread support for Black capitalism, not all Black leaders were on board. Andrew Brimmer, the first Black member of the Federal Reserve Board, argued that the concept was “a cruel hoax” since the economy was moving away from small, locally owned businesses toward nationwide chains. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, called Black capitalism “simple nonsense,” claiming that for the foreseeable future “the bulk of all people who work will earn their living as workers—as employees, not as entrepreneurs.” And Robert Allen, a California activist, maintained that Black capitalism would simply replace white exploiters with Black ones. “What CORE and the cultural nationalists seek is not an end to oppression,” he wrote in Black Awakening in Capitalist America, “but the transfer of the oppressive apparatus into their own hands.”

  McKissick acknowledged the historical racism of capitalism. But he believed there was a difference between white capitalism, which was a “destructive, violent force,” and Black capitalism, which was “designed to alleviate much of the poverty and powerlessness of the Black population of America.” Yes, if Black businessmen conducted their affairs like most capitalists—engaging in cutthroat competition, refusing to pay fair wages, focusing only on the bottom line—they would be no better than their white counterparts. But as he explained in his weekly column for the New York Amsterdam News, the goal wasn’t just to create a few Black millionaires. “It is rather a pragmatic response to the condition of the nation. It is a realistic means by which Black People can gain power.”

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  MCKISSICK’S EARLY EFFORTS to promote Black capitalism were modest. At the 1966 CORE convention, he announced the formation of the Harlem Commonwealth Council, which sought to acquire all commercial real estate on 125th Street in Harlem. The same year, he proposed a network of Black cooperatives across the South to protect civil rights activists from retaliation by white banks and businessmen. Over time, however, his ambitions grew, and he returned to his old dream of building new cities—cities where Black people would control the levers of power and capital. Twenty years earlier, on his return from the war, that dream had seemed premature. But now, with th
e limits of integration becoming clear and the Black community expressing a new sense of pride, the idea seemed ripe, and McKissick began to discuss it casually, as though trying it on for size. In December 1966, he testified before the Senate that one way of addressing the urban crisis was to build new cities that would relieve overcrowding, create jobs, and establish “a new environment fit for men, black and white, to live in.” In July 1967, he issued the “Black Manifesto,” a document that surveyed the demands of various Black groups, including those who desired separation, and argued that “with land the government now owns, or could acquire, new cities can, in fact, be built to be owned and controlled by Black People.” Two months later, he told a reporter during an impromptu interview that CORE would soon announce plans “to develop a black community from the ground up.”

  With this last statement, McKissick was getting ahead of himself. It was true he had begun preliminary planning for a new city. He had recently received a grant from the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, a nonprofit founded by the psychologist Kenneth Clark, that would enable him to take a brief leave of absence to study the matter. But CORE was in no position to tackle such a project. Although McKissick had reduced the organization’s debt and made it relevant again, there were still deep divisions within its ranks. Some members thought McKissick had gone too far in his embrace of Black Power, while others complained he hadn’t gone far enough. The radical wing of CORE, seeking to end the group’s reliance on white support, was angry that he had accepted a $175,000 grant from the Ford Foundation for a program in Cleveland focused on voter registration, job training, and leadership instruction. These tensions erupted at CORE’s 1967 convention in Oakland, with the militant forces demanding a ban on donations from white organizations. McKissick pushed back, pointing out that CORE was still in the red and that foundation grants were essential to its survival. But in an effort to appease the insurgents, he agreed to eliminate the word “multiracial” from the section of CORE’s constitution describing its membership. Defending the move to reporters, McKissick insisted it did not mean the exclusion of whites from the organization. Other members disagreed, declaring that the change had been made to “let the world know the direction that CORE is going.”

  Throughout the remainder of 1967 and early 1968, McKissick continued to emphasize economic equality and self-determination. In December, he joined King in support of boycotting the Olympics. In February, he argued that Black people must “have absolute power over the institutions in their own communities,” while in March he called for the establishment of a separate school board in New York to address the needs of Black children. And on April 4, McKissick unveiled a plan in Cleveland to promote Black ownership of local factories. Designed by a San Francisco political economist named Louis Kelso, the plan was based on the idea that creating jobs for poor Blacks was not enough. In order to achieve true equality, Black Americans had to become owners, since most of the nation’s wealth was a return on capital. “Our intention is not to establish a new welfare burden for present property owners and wage earners,” McKissick declared. “Our intention is to establish a series of economic institutions whereby black residents of Cleveland can be owners of capital instruments rather than welfare recipients.” The proposal was hailed by white executives, including Henry Ford II and William Schoen, a Detroit businessman who pledged $250,000 of 3M stock to CORE’s Cleveland chapter.

  But on the same day McKissick unveiled his proposal in Cleveland, King was shot dead in Memphis, and the civil rights movement was thrown into disarray. McKissick was nearly beside himself with rage. Speaking at a hastily arranged press conference in Cleveland, he declared King’s death a “horror” that marked the end of nonviolence. “Black Americans will no longer tolerate this killing of their males,” he told reporters, tears filling his eyes. Later that night, having flown to Washington, DC, he was even more emotional, telling a reporter, “The next Negro to advocate nonviolence should be torn to bits by black people.” And the following morning, he caused a scene in a corridor of the White House when he angrily refused to attend a meeting of civil rights leaders with President Johnson because SNCC and other militant groups had been excluded.

  The year before his death, King had published a book titled Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? It was his attempt to chart a path forward for the civil rights movement, to reconcile the demands of Black Power with the political realities of white America. Now, with King gone, that question was being asked again. But this time, it was accompanied by another question: Who would take King’s place at the head of the movement? In an article in the New York Times, the legendary civil rights reporter Claude Sitton recalled King’s description of himself as a “drum major for justice” and asked, “Now that the drum major is gone, who will lead the crusade?” McKissick, he wrote, “speaks with a militancy and determination surpassed by few other nationally known Negroes.” But CORE was a “ghost of its former self,” with a shrinking membership, a dwindling financial base, and a national profile kept alive only by McKissick’s frequent media appearances. Sitton was equally skeptical of the other candidates, describing Stokely Carmichael as the “high priest” of the “Black Power cult,” dismissing Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young as “not equal to the challenge of today’s problem,” and asserting that Ralph Abernathy could not “hope realistically to provide the leadership on the national scene that the circumstances seem to demand.” Ultimately, Sitton concluded, the problems of racial injustice and economic inequality could not be solved by any one organization or leader, but would require “massive” federal programs supported by “all Americans, black and white standing together.”

  McKissick addressing a crowd of Garment District workers in New York City four days after King’s assassination.

  It was a nice image, if not exactly realistic. By 1968, with spending on the Vietnam War at its height, the country’s appetite for massive federal programs was waning. It took King’s assassination and what remained of Johnson’s political capital to pass the Fair Housing Act and the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, the last two pieces of Great Society legislation. Nor was the prospect of “all Americans, black and white standing together” very plausible. After the widespread riots that followed King’s death, racial tensions were as bad as they had been since Reconstruction. Leading the country out of the morass would require visionary leadership and an organization with real credibility.

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  THIS IS WHY the stakes were so high when McKissick called a meeting of CORE’s National Action Council in May, and why its rejection of his plan for building new cities was so disheartening. In the months after he announced his resignation and Innis took over the leadership role, CORE descended into turmoil. During the first week of July, it held its annual convention at the Sheraton Hotel in Columbus, Ohio. It was the twenty-fifth convention since the group’s founding and, in many ways, its last. The gathering began smoothly enough, with rare appearances by Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, both of whom pleaded for unity within the fractured civil rights community. Young even broke from his past rejection of Black Power, telling the delegates that America responded only to threats and pressure, not “to people who beg on moral grounds.” There was also a dinner in McKissick’s honor, attended by Muhammad Ali and James Baldwin. Speaking before a crowd of three hundred, McKissick grew nostalgic as he recalled his long association with CORE, from the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947 to the sit-ins of 1960 to the March Against Fear two years earlier. He also made clear just how difficult it was for him to resign, going so far as to suggest he might not be finished after all. “I might just step aside for a little while,” he said, “but it would make too many white people happy if I leave.”

  From there, the convention went downhill fast. The same issues that had divided the delegates a year earlier—chapter autonomy, support from white foundations, the meaning of Black capitalism—surfaced again, this time in more intractable form. A group of delegates from
Brooklyn and the Bronx, furious with Innis’s imposition of a yearly assessment on all chapters, walked out on the last day and announced plans to form a splinter organization. Their departure prevented CORE from ratifying a new constitution and electing a national director. Two months later, the delegates reconvened in St. Louis to take care of unfinished business. After another walkout, this time by a Chicago group, the remaining chapters elected Innis as national director and approved a new constitution that excluded whites from active membership, thus completing CORE’s transformation from a multiracial pacifist group to an all-Black association with separation as its goal. As Innis put it in his first press release after the convention, CORE had become “once and for all … a Black Nationalist Organization.”