by Thomas Healy
Congress was less certain. When the House voted on the bill, it omitted the provision for new communities. The Senate retained the provision, but not without a fight. During a contentious committee hearing, Senator John Tower of Texas complained that the program was too costly and speculative. Other senators wondered what the difference was between subdivisions, which were already supported by another program, and new communities. The bill’s sponsor, Alabama Democrat John Sparkman, responded that a subdivision was simply a collection of homes, whereas a new town would have its own police station, schools, churches, and fire department—“everything necessary for the operation of a city.” Sparkman also agreed to cut the price tag in half, to $250 million. That was enough to allay opposition, and Tower’s motion to strike the provision was narrowly defeated. The House then agreed to reinstate the program, and on August 1, 1968, Johnson signed the New Communities Act into law.
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MCKISSICK ENTERPRISES WAS incorporated that same month, but McKissick didn’t initially grasp the implications of the new legislation. Not until Samuel C. Jackson, a longtime friend who had recently become assistant secretary at HUD, explained the details of the New Communities Act did McKissick fully realize what it meant. When he did, he quickly got to work. He assigned Gordon Carey to draft a proposal for a new city while he headed south to look for land.
For Carey, who was thirty-six at the time, it was the perfect assignment. The son of an itinerant preacher who joined CORE in the early 1940s, Carey had spent his entire life immersed in the cause of social justice. As a boy, he met James Farmer at a Methodist camp his father ran in Michigan. In high school, he spent a summer working with the Quakers on the Cocopah Indian Reservation in Arizona. And at the age of eighteen, he volunteered on a cargo ship carrying livestock to war-torn Japan. Known as a “goat boat,” the ship left San Francisco in January 1950 and arrived a month later in Okinawa. Once there, Carey and his crewmates spent a month as guests of the occupation government, frequenting the clubs established for American soldiers. Carey, who had led a sheltered life as a preacher’s son, was disgusted by what he saw—gambling, drinking, prostitution—and began to question the integrity of the US government. He also began to flirt with anarchism, and when he registered for the draft, in 1950, he listed himself as a conscientious objector.
Carey was at a Quaker work camp in Mexico when the draft office notified him that he had been exempted from military service because of his religious beliefs. For most conscientious objectors, that would have been good news. But Carey was troubled. As he explained in a letter to the draft office, if he accepted the exemption he would be allowing someone else to be drafted in his place. That didn’t seem right to Carey, who rejected the government’s authority to force anyone to serve. The draft office, not surprisingly, disagreed. But it did make one concession: it sent Carey a new draft card. He was now listed as eligible for military service and ordered to report immediately for induction. When he failed to show up, a federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest.
What happened next was farcical. Carey was in Pasadena, California, by this time, living with his parents, and FBI agents staked out their house. The problem was the agents always arrived after Carey left in the morning and departed before he returned home. After a week, his mother became so annoyed she ratted out her son, telling the agents he was at his girlfriend’s house across town. When they turned up there to arrest him, Carey refused to cooperate, letting his body go limp so that the agents had to transport him to jail in a wheelchair. The incident was so unusual in 1953 that the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story about it the next day, complete with a photo of Carey sporting black-rimmed glasses, a pencil-thin mustache, and a high pompadour, with a loose strand of hair falling dramatically over his forehead.
Against the advice of the judge who heard his case, Carey represented himself, repeating the argument he had made in his letter: the government had no power to force men to serve against their will. The judge was no more sympathetic to this argument than the draft office. He sentenced Carey to three years in the Catalina Federal Honor Camp, a minimum-security prison in the mountains of Arizona. Established in 1933, Catalina housed low-level offenders who posed little threat of escape; instead of fences or barbed wire, a white line on the ground marked its boundaries. Carey worked in the infirmary, cleaning teeth, dispensing medication, and serving meals. But mostly he read. For a prison, Catalina was surprisingly well stocked with subversive literature. Carey plowed his way through works by Nehru and Trotsky, Emerson and Thoreau. The book that influenced him most was Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a treatise on nonviolent resistance that had inspired Gandhi.
After a year in prison, Carey appeared before a parole board. Asked whether he had learned his lesson, he said he would do the same thing again. The board released him anyway, and Carey moved back to California, where he took classes at Pasadena City College. Already active in CORE, he was soon offered a job on the national staff in New York, working first as a field secretary, then as program director, and finally as assistant to the national director. During his six years there, he was instrumental in transforming CORE from a small, sleepy organization into one of the most visible and important players in the civil rights movement. In the end, though, the very changes Carey helped make possible within CORE led to his departure from it. As the organization moved away from its pacifist, interracial roots, his presence on the national staff angered some members, and he resigned in 1964. Carey wasn’t happy about being forced out, but like many white activists he understood the desire of Black people to control their own struggle. “It was inevitable that the leadership had to move to a younger, Blacker group,” he said later.
He felt the same way in August 1968 when McKissick asked him to draft a proposal for a new city, built by Blacks. As a civil rights activist, Carey believed wholeheartedly in integration. But he also believed that Black Americans had to “free themselves from the mental enslavement they were under.” And he saw no contradiction between the two. Nor did he see any tension in his involvement with the project, since his job was to help McKissick achieve his dream, not to dictate its essence. “The only way Blacks can become independent is to become a nation, to overthrow the powers that be,” Carey explained. “But that doesn’t mean the races can’t live together.”
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OVER THE NEXT couple months, Carey worked diligently on the proposal, reviewing the history of new towns, poring over government reports, and engaging in long talks with McKissick. The result, completed in October, served as the basis for all future proposals submitted to HUD. It began with the observation McKissick had been making for years: the crisis of the cities was linked to the crisis of the countryside. As opportunities dried up in small towns and rural areas, millions of poor people migrated to the cities in search of jobs. But the cities were unprepared to receive them. Built haphazardly, they had no plan for meeting the demands imposed by a flood of new residents. Thus, when the migrants arrived, often penniless and without skills or education, they found themselves in a situation nearly as bad as the one they had left. Instead of clean, modern housing, they were packed into dangerous, disease-ridden slums. Instead of community and connection, they found alienation and social anomie. Instead of rewarding, high-paying jobs, they found work that was menial and meaningless, if they were lucky enough to find work at all.
Gordon Carey at a CORE protest in the early 1960s.
This situation affected all poor people, the proposal acknowledged, but it affected poor Blacks most of all. Because of housing and employment discrimination, Blacks were disproportionately relegated to the ghettos, where overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and inadequate public services were most pronounced. That was one of the factors behind the spate of “urban rebellions” in recent years. With no way to make their voices heard, Black people had resorted to the only means available for drawing attention to their plight: violence and destruction. That violence had then tr
iggered fresh confrontations with police, which only made the problem worse. “The end result,” the proposal explained, “has been perpetuation of racial tensions and fears, themselves one of the root causes of urban blight.”
What was the solution to this “self-perpetuating” problem? The Kerner Commission, established by Johnson to investigate the causes of urban unrest, had identified three possible responses: maintain the status quo; improve the “racial ghettos”; or relocate their residents to the suburbs. The commission ruled out the first option as a nonstarter, leaving improvements to the ghettos and relocation to the suburbs as the only possibilities. But in an article published in Progressive Architecture in August 1968, an architect named Ervin Galantay argued that this was a false choice. Titled “Black New Towns: The Fourth Alternative,” the article noted that the commission had failed to consider another option: building new cities for Black Americans. To Galantay, this was the logical solution. The Model Cities program was destined to fail, he thought, because its resources were diluted across too many communities. But if the government put all its energy and money into one massive project—such as a new city—it might actually make a difference.
Carey had not read Galantay’s article (and Galantay was apparently unaware of McKissick’s plan), but their proposals were strikingly similar. Like Galantay, Carey first considered other answers to the urban crisis. Some Black leaders had suggested that all political and economic power in the ghettos be transferred to Black people, either individually or collectively. But this was only a partial solution, Carey explained, since the ghettos were in desperate straits. In any event, there was little chance white politicians and businessmen would agree to such a plan. A better answer was to start from scratch, to create new communities that would combine the best elements of urban and rural living. Countries such as England and Sweden had been experimenting with new cities for decades, the proposal pointed out. A handful of new towns had also been built in the United States. So far, however, Blacks had been largely excluded from these efforts. None of the new towns under construction were likely to achieve economic integration, much less racial balance. “The few blacks who may live in these communities,” the proposal asserted, “will be lost in a sea of white suburbanites and will find themselves even further from the ability to determine their own affairs.”
What America needed was cities built by and for Black people, cities that could provide “opportunity for Black youth,” “new homes for Black families,” “educational systems truly responsive to Black children,” and “work for many Black unemployed and underemployed.” Building “black-oriented cities,” the proposal declared, would “provide an opportunity for the establishment of Black economic and political power without challenge to those already in control of existing cities.” Moreover, these cities could serve as a testing ground for new ideas in urban planning. Unburdened by the mistakes of the past, planners could start fresh, rethinking the role of critical institutions, such as law enforcement, fire departments, and hospitals.
When it came to details, Carey’s proposal was still thin. It suggested that the city would be developed in stages, eventually reaching a population of eighteen thousand, and that it would include everything found in a self-sustaining community: schools, churches, parks, recreation centers, industry, and job training. It also indicated that the city would be built in a rural area, far from an existing metropolis, since that would allow it to develop its own culture and identity. As for who would live there, the proposal maintained that the city would be open to people of all races. But it made clear that the majority of residents would be Black. “Persons of any color or persuasion will be welcomed as technicians for this city, and as residents,” the proposal stated. “However, the town will be built with primary concern for the interest and welfare of Blacks and other disadvantaged minorities.”
Anticipating the objections this might generate, Carey included a section titled “Black Orientation of the New Community.” It was here that he attempted to justify the focus on Black needs and counter the claims of separatism. As a predominantly Black community, the proposal stated, “the new city will not further segregation, but rather provide a source of inspiration to Blacks throughout the country and a living proof to members of all other races that the Black man can hold his own in any modern economy, and can, in fact, exercise a role of leadership for the entire nation.” If successful, the new city could be a model for other communities and an exporter of Black talent to the rest of the country. But its most important contribution would be psychological: “The tangible evidence of a new city, planned, built and operated primarily by Black people could bring hope to the most depressed areas of the nation.”
The proposal ended with an action plan. It noted that McKissick had been in touch with James Rouse, the developer of Columbia, who had offered free training for McKissick’s staff. McKissick had also been promised help by a number of other prominent institutions, including the business schools of Harvard and Columbia. Over the next few months, McKissick Enterprises would establish departments dealing with the full range of development activities: industrial and residential land sales, construction, educational systems, utilities, community services, finance, and marketing. The proposal also provided tentative cost estimates. The budget for the first six months would be a hundred thousand dollars. But that would cover only the most preliminary expenses. Ultimately, McKissick would need far greater sums to plan and develop his city.
At the moment, however, that city was just an abstraction, a vague dream without so much as a name. In order to make it a reality, McKissick would need land on which to build.
PART II
• 5 •
Klan Country
In the fall of 1968, McKissick traveled to North Carolina to scout for property. For a developer hoping to build a new city, it was not an obvious place to look. California was a more logical choice, with an abundance of land, a growing economy, and several large projects already under way, including the planned community of Irvine in Orange County. New York State was also fertile ground for new cities, as was the area around Washington, DC, home to both Reston and Columbia. But McKissick was determined to build his new city in the South. Since most Black people in the North had migrated from below the Mason-Dixon Line, he reasoned, they were more likely to relocate there than anywhere else. And if he was going to build his new city in the South, he might as well return to the state where he’d been born and raised. Another Asheville native, Thomas Wolfe, wrote that “You can’t go home again,” but for McKissick home was the only place he wanted to be.
His reasons for choosing North Carolina were not just sentimental. McKissick believed the state’s economic climate was conducive to his plans. With its first-rate universities, highly regarded banks, and pro-business culture, North Carolina was viewed as a model of the New South. Less dependent on slavery than the rest of the Confederacy, it had emerged from the nineteenth century with a more optimistic, ambitious attitude than its neighbors. Instead of clinging hopelessly to an antebellum plantation economy, it had invested heavily in industry, betting its future on textiles and furniture. The results were impressive. From 1900 to 1939, the value of its manufactured products increased more than that of any other southern state, and its total manufacturing value was second only to Texas, a state five times its size. In the words of the political scientist V. O. Key, North Carolina had demonstrated a “relentless forward determination.”
From a political standpoint, the state was also attractive to McKissick. As Key observed in his 1949 book Southern Politics in State and Nation, North Carolina had been blessed with a record of stable and responsible leadership. “For a half century no scandals have marred the state administration. No band of highwaymen posing as public officials has raided the public treasury. No clowns have held public office—save the erratic and irrelevant Bob Reynolds—and there have been no violent outbursts by citizens repressed beyond endurance.” Instead, the state had been
guided by respectable, if stodgy, conservatives who were more interested in promoting business than fanning the flames of racism or pandering to populism. It had even produced a handful of leading liberals, including Frank Porter Graham, the US senator and past president of the University of North Carolina, and former governor Terry Sanford, who would soon become president of Duke University. For that reason, Key had labeled it a “progressive plutocracy,” while a Black journalist who visited the state in 1947 wrote that it was “something of a living answer to the riddle of race.”
Not that racism wasn’t alive and well in the Old North State. It was still part of the South, with all the historical baggage that entailed. Although slavery had not dominated the state’s economy, enslaved people still accounted for one-third of its population at the start of the Civil War. And although North Carolina had initially resisted calls for secession, it ultimately joined the Confederacy and then, after the defeat of Reconstruction, implemented a regime of white supremacy. When Black Republicans rebelled against that system, joining with populists to win control of the state government in 1894, white Democrats unleashed a campaign of violence that crushed the nascent fusion party. In Wilmington, an armed mob rampaged through the city, setting fire to the office of a Black newspaper, killing dozens of Black residents, and forcing the Republican mayor and city council out of office. It was the only successful coup d’état in American history, and Democrats moved quickly to ensure it would never be necessary again. Following the lead of other Southern states, they enacted a poll tax and literacy test designed to disenfranchise Black voters while grandfathering in poor, uneducated whites.