by Thomas Healy
If McKissick had any doubts about his decision to resign, the events of that summer erased them. As he had predicted a year before, the era of the big civil rights groups was coming to an end. The movement might not be dead, but for McKissick—and the country—it was time to begin a new chapter.
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Dreams into Reality
When McKissick left CORE in the summer of 1968, he could have pursued any number of opportunities. With his national reputation and successful legal career, he could have joined a high-powered New York law firm, taken a job as a university professor, or run for a seat in Congress, as several friends had urged him to do earlier in the year. But McKissick was determined to prove the viability of Black capitalism, so he did what any good capitalist would do: he started his own business.
With a fifty-thousand-dollar loan from Chase Manhattan Bank, he founded McKissick Enterprises, a for-profit corporation designed to serve as a national clearinghouse for Black capitalism. Both a resource for other businesses and an investment vehicle itself, McKissick Enterprises had an ambitious goal: “to create and distribute profits to millions of Black Americans.” To achieve this goal, the company would launch, and invest in, a variety of business ventures, from real estate to restaurants to retail. It would also assist other Black entrepreneurs, serving as a conduit to banks, providing technical advice, and leveraging McKissick’s name on behalf of smaller firms. The corporation would be guided by a commitment to social justice but would need to generate profits to succeed. For that reason, McKissick made clear he would only invest in projects that promised a high rate of return. He also insisted the corporation would not become a tool of white oppression. As he explained in announcing his plan, “The Black Man and Woman will no longer be content to eat leftovers in the kitchen. We want to sit at our own table and carve the financial turkey with all its trimmings.”
In spite of its grand ambitions, the headquarters of McKissick Enterprises was humble—a suite of rooms on the second floor of a two-story walk-up on 125th Street in Harlem, just down the street from the Apollo Theater. The offices were small, the furniture secondhand, and the bathrooms frequently out of service. But what it lacked in opulence, the office made up for with energy and a sense of purpose. It was led by Gordon Carey, the former CORE field secretary who had been ousted as part of the purge of white leadership. Occupying an office next to McKissick’s, he served as an unofficial chief operating officer, managing day-to-day affairs and attempting to carry out McKissick’s expansive vision. Working with him was a small staff of well-educated professionals, marketing and finance types who dressed in two-piece suits and took their jobs seriously. There was Froncell “Skip” Tolbert, a former marine and commercial lending officer who served as director of finance; Leslie Roberts, an alumnus of Harvard Business School who oversaw business development; and Lloyd Von Blaine, a public relations executive who owned a share of Frank’s Restaurant, a Harlem institution where McKissick often held court in a corner booth. There were also three administrative assistants: Dorothy (“Dot”) and Margaret Waller, unmarried sisters who had worked for McKissick in Durham, then followed him to New York when he took over CORE; and Jane Groom, a vivacious young mother of five from the projects north of the city. On a typical day, the office buzzed with activity—the sound of phones ringing, typewriters clicking, and staff dictating letters. The only thing that might break their concentration was a visit from some prominent civil rights figure—James Farmer, John Killens, or Stokely Carmichael, the last of whom would breeze into the office in a long, colorful dashiki and greet the secretaries in a loud, exuberant voice: “Hello, my beautiful African Queens. You are like flowers after a spring rain.” The atmosphere was one of solidarity and optimism, an ethos best captured by a large poster that greeted visitors at the top of the steep stairs. Printed in black, red, and green, the colors of the Pan-African flag, it succinctly stated the mission of McKissick Enterprises: “Dreams into Reality.”
During its first few months, the company launched a hodgepodge of business ventures: a publishing house called Thunder and Lightning, which purchased the rights to Robert F. Williams’s Black Power manifesto Negroes with Guns; an import-export business, which sent Carey on a scouting trip to Mexico; a public relations firm targeted at Black companies; and a chain of restaurants and nightclubs featuring African-style food and entertainment. The firm also developed plans to build a shopping mall in Mount Vernon, New York, and McKissick joined Harlem Freedom Associates, a partnership of leading Harlemites (including Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Cosby) that purchased the Woolworth building on 125th Street, then leased it back to the store and used the profits to address community needs.
Based on his wide-ranging activities, one might have thought McKissick had set aside his dream of building a new city. After all, when he released a list of prospective projects shortly after filing for incorporation, the development of new towns appeared near the bottom, just above plans for Harlem Delight Coffee and a new line of hot sauce. But McKissick hadn’t given up his dream. He was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to strike. And he soon received the encouragement he was looking for.
* * *
IT CAME FROM Washington. For many years, even before the riots of the 1960s, federal officials had been searching desperately for a way to improve living conditions in the cities. An influx of foreign immigrants and rural refugees since the turn of the century had placed heavy strains on the nation’s urban centers. Public transportation was deficient, social services were stretched thin, and the housing stock was old, inadequate, and substandard. The postwar housing boom had only made matters worse. Instead of building new apartments in metropolitan areas, developers had erected sprawling housing tracts in the suburbs, luring the white middle class away from the cities. This didn’t relieve the problem of urban overcrowding, however. As middle-class whites fled, poor Blacks from the South streamed in, and the resulting decline in tax revenue made it even harder for city officials to turn things around.
Congress had initially responded to this downward spiral with a program of urban renewal that provided money for local governments to demolish slums and build high-rise housing projects. In cities such as New York, Boston, and Chicago, entire neighborhoods were razed, and tens of thousands of poor, mostly Black residents were uprooted. Some were given apartments in the new projects, but many were displaced, with no choice but to move to other slums that had not yet been destroyed. As James Baldwin put it, “urban renewal” was really just “Negro removal.” Not that those who remained behind were fortunate. Many of the new housing projects, such as the infamous Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis, quickly became slums themselves. Poorly designed, cheaply built, and badly maintained, they soon became overcrowded and run-down, infested with rats and roaches, breeding grounds for crime, illness, and delinquency.
It was these conditions, some social scientists argued, that had triggered the riots in the first place. People packed together like animals were bound to act like animals. One scientist even tested the theory, crowding rats into cages and documenting the pathology that ensued: a spike in aggression and mortality, a decline in fertility and social interaction. In a phrase that excited popular fears, he described rats living in such conditions as “going berserk.” He also argued that overcrowding resulted in a “behavioral sink,” a self-perpetuating descent into the abyss that inspired Tom Wolfe’s 1968 ode to urban chaos “O Rotten Gotham—Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink.”
The worst was yet to come, sociologists warned. As more people moved to the cities in search of opportunity, unemployment and overcrowding would continue to rise, making life increasingly unbearable. According to the National Committee on Urban Growth Policy, the country would add a hundred million people by the start of the twenty-first century, and the vast majority would live in cities. Such forecasts sparked a revival of interest in the ideas of Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century British demographer who predicted that population growth would le
ad to famine and devastation. There was even a new Malthus, a Stanford University professor named Paul Ehrlich whose 1968 book The Population Bomb became a New York Times bestseller. Opening with the ominous declaration that “the battle to feed all humanity is over,” the book described a dystopian future characterized by mass starvation and an alarming rise in the global death rate.
Since becoming president in 1963, Lyndon Johnson had taken a series of steps to address the mounting crisis. In 1964, he signed a bill creating the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the first cabinet-level agency focused on cities. A year later, he established the Task Force on Metropolitan and Urban Problems. Led by Robert Wood, a political scientist at MIT, the task force proposed a variety of initiatives for revitalizing the slums, including the popular Model Cities program, which provided infusions of cash to help communities combat the entire menu of urban ills—poverty, joblessness, crime, and shoddy housing. But revitalizing the slums was only part of the solution. Even if the cities became more livable, they were still incapable of absorbing the huge increase in population projected over the next half century. For that reason, Wood’s task force concluded that the nation needed to do more than rehabilitate existing cities; it needed to build new ones as well. And because the task force believed private developers were unlikely to build those cities on their own, it recommended that the government oversee the effort itself.
As radical as this sounded, it was not without precedent. Seventy years earlier, at the close of the nineteenth century, a similar idea had taken hold in England. Known as the “garden city movement,” it was the brainchild of Ebenezer Howard, a London court reporter who was appalled by the city’s wretched living conditions and set out to find a solution. The problem, as Howard described it in his 1898 book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, was that cities and rural areas offered mutually exclusive attractions. Cities had jobs, good wages, social interaction, and entertainment, but suffered from long commutes, overcrowding, inadequate housing, and a lack of nature. The country offered low rents, relaxation, proximity to nature, and fresh air, but lacked jobs, society, culture, and a communal spirit. These two environments were like magnets, pulling people in opposite directions. Instead of choosing between the two, Howard proposed merging them into a third setting—the “town-country magnet”—that combined the best of both worlds. To illustrate his theory, he sketched a diagram of three magnets arrayed around a group of people with the caption, “Where Will They Go?” To Howard, the answer was obvious. They would go where they could find high wages and low rent, natural beauty and human interaction, a field for enterprise and a flow of capital, freedom and cooperation. They would go to Garden City.
Howard’s book had a utopian sensibility, but it was also quite specific. He had worked out all the details of what Garden City would look like. It would cover six thousand acres, would be “of circular form,” and would have “six magnificent boulevards—each 120 feet wide,” dividing it into six equal parts. At the center would be a garden surrounded by a series of grand public buildings, which would themselves be encircled by a 145-acre park. Next would come a glass shopping arcade called the “Crystal Palace,” followed by concentric rings of houses, with an average lot size of 20 by 130 feet. The city would have a population of thirty thousand, while an additional two thousand people would live and work on an agricultural “green belt” surrounding it. Factories and workshops would separate the city from the green belt and would be linked by a circular railway, which would connect to a larger railway running to other garden cities. Howard had even devised a method of financing his cities, estimating that each resident would have to pay no more than two pounds a year to cover rent and maintenance.
Howard’s proposal was hugely influential in England, leading to the creation of two Garden Cities—Letchworth, forty miles north of London, and Welwyn Garden City, halfway between the two. But his ideas were even more popular abroad, spawning replicas throughout Europe and inspiring the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, who attempted to translate the Garden City concept into a high-rise modernist development called Radiant City. In the United States, Howard was embraced by a group of planners known as the Decentrists, who wanted to disperse the urban population to a series of small, self-contained communities linked by a network of highways. Although their plan never materialized, they did build two towns in the Garden City image—Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York, and Radburn, New Jersey, twenty miles west of Manhattan. Howard’s ideas also shaped federal policy during the Great Depression. Faced with a sharp drop in agricultural prices and fearing that farmers would crowd into cities looking for work, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration, an agency charged with building new communities. Under the guidance of Rexford Guy Tugwell, a Columbia University economist, the agency built three towns modeled on Howard’s proposal: Greenbelt, Maryland; Greendale, Wisconsin; and Greenhills, Ohio. More than three thousand families moved into the towns, at a cost of $20 million. But the program came under attack for its hefty price tag and collectivist ethos (Tugwell, who had visited Russia in 1927, was nicknamed “Rex the Red”). And when a federal court ruled that it exceeded Congress’s powers, the program was phased out, and the three towns were handed over to local homeowners’ groups.
The drive to build new cities resumed in the wake of World War II as the return of soldiers and the baby boom created an urgent need for housing. This time, the private sector took the lead. In 1946, a group of developers in Illinois announced plans for Park Forest, a fully planned community thirty-five miles south of Chicago. Envisioned as a middle-class enclave primarily for veterans, Park Forest was one of the first successful new towns in the United States, reaching a population of thirty thousand by 1960. A few years later, Robert E. Simon, a wealthy real estate investor from New York, sold his interest in Carnegie Hall and bought nearly seven thousand acres of land in rural Virginia, eighteen miles west of Washington, DC. There, he broke ground on Reston (the name derived from his initials), a community designed as an alternative to the cookie-cutter houses and bland streets of most postwar suburbs. Built around a European-style village center, Reston relied on mixed zoning, high density, and open spaces to create an urban atmosphere in a pastoral setting. Meanwhile, thirty miles northeast of Washington, the shopping mall magnate James Rouse founded Columbia, Maryland. At fourteen thousand acres, Columbia was double the size of Reston and even more ambitious in concept. Instead of a bedroom community, Rouse set out to build a self-sufficient city of a hundred thousand people with its own economic base. He had already won approval from local officials and was about to begin construction on the first of Columbia’s nine planned villages.
Despite the success of Park Forest, Reston, and Columbia, many private developers were reluctant to build new towns because of the high start-up costs and likelihood of failure. After purchasing a vast tract of land, a developer might spend several years and tens of millions of dollars clearing land, paving roads, and installing electricity, water, and sewer systems before generating any revenue. All the while, he had to pay off his debt, a burden that grew heavier as interest rates rose in the late 1960s. Both Reston and Columbia were backed by major corporations—the former by Gulf Oil, the latter by Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, Chase Manhattan, and the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association. But even they faced financial difficulties. Reston nearly went bankrupt in its early years and was taken over by Gulf Oil in 1967, while James Rouse was forced to surrender half his interest in Columbia to Connecticut Life. Given the risk that a similar fate might befall them, most developers weren’t willing to take the chance, choosing instead to build featureless suburban housing tracts such as Levittown, New York, and Daly City, California, the latter of which was caricatured in a famous folk song by Malvina Reynolds:
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
An
d a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky,
And they all look just the same.
To remedy this problem, Wood’s task force proposed federal support for new towns. Under its plan, the government would not give money directly to new-town developers but would use a system of mortgage insurance to guarantee loans made by banks and other investors. That guarantee, the task force believed, would attract investors not normally interested in new towns, since the risk of default would be borne entirely by the government.
Johnson included the group’s proposal in his recommendation to Congress in January 1966, and a watered-down version made it into the Housing and Urban Development Act approved that year. But the provision for new towns was overshadowed by the Model Cities program, and over the next two years not a single developer applied for assistance under it. In the meantime, the administration continued to study the matter, consulting with universities, developers, lenders, and nonprofits such as the RAND Corporation. Then came the riots of 1967, and televised images of once-great cities such as Detroit and Newark being burned and looted created a new sense of urgency. One month after establishing the Kerner Commission to investigate the causes of urban unrest, Johnson created the Task Force on New Towns to revisit the work of Wood’s group. Finishing its report in the fall of 1967, the task force expanded upon the ideas of the earlier group. Instead of merely providing mortgage insurance for developers, it proposed a more direct form of support: loans backed by government bonds. It also recommended a comprehensive system of federal assistance in which HUD would work directly with developers, and other agencies would supply grants to fund infrastructure projects such as water, sewerage, and electricity.
Johnson incorporated these proposals in the New Communities Act, which he submitted to Congress in February 1968. Part of a larger bill designed to add six million homes for low-income Americans over the next decade, the act called for the allocation of $500 million to build new towns across the country, with a cap of $50 million per town. Introducing the proposal from his ranch in Texas, Johnson described new towns as part of a two-pronged strategy to address the housing needs of the future. “Revitalizing our city cores and improving our expanding metropolitan areas will go far toward sheltering that new generation,” he declared. “But there is another way as well, which we should encourage and support. It is the new community, freshly planned and built.”