Soul City

by Thomas Healy

  John Hope Franklin described the Wilmington insurrection as “the dying gasp of a reign of terror,” and over the next half century the state avoided the worst excesses of Jim Crow as governors such as Charles Aycock promoted universal education for both Blacks and whites. Yet even as its policies became marginally more progressive, racism held a powerful grip on the state. Aycock was a white supremacist who thought Blacks were fit only for manual labor, and Sam Ervin, the state’s longtime senator, was one of the signers of the 1956 Southern Manifesto, which condemned the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and vowed to preserve segregation by all legal means. A graduate of Harvard Law School who nonetheless described himself as “a simple country lawyer,” Ervin also led the Democratic Party’s opposition to civil rights legislation during the 1960s. Maintaining that the federal government lacked the power to regulate racial discrimination, he famously argued that individuals were “entitled to their prejudices as well as their allergies.”

  So North Carolina was certainly “no picnic ground for its Negro citizens,” as Key was quick to acknowledge. But with the possible exception of Virginia, it was more hospitable to Black people than any other southern state. And that “hospitality” had made possible something else that appealed to McKissick: a strong tradition of Black activism he could draw on for support. Not only had the sit-in movement been launched in Greensboro, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been formed at Shaw University in Raleigh. A number of influential activists had also emerged from North Carolina, including Ella Baker, the onetime aide to Martin Luther King Jr. who was known as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”; Pauli Murray, the pioneering lawyer who coined the term “Jane Crow” to highlight the sexist dimensions of racial discrimination; and Jesse Jackson, a South Carolina native who made his name as student body president at North Carolina A&T, one of the state’s many historically Black colleges. Perhaps most importantly for McKissick, the Black Power movement had strong roots in the state. One of the movement’s earliest heroes was Robert F. Williams, a former marine who headed the NAACP chapter in the town of Monroe during the late 1950s and early 1960s. At a time when nonviolence was the rallying cry of most civil rights leaders, Williams sang a different tune. Fed up with the terrorist tactics of the Ku Klux Klan, he called for armed self-defense, forming a local chapter of the National Rifle Association and asserting that Blacks “must be willing to kill if necessary.” Williams fled the country in 1961 after being brought up on trumped-up charges of kidnapping and was now living in China. But his legacy had inspired a new generation of activists, including the Pan-Africanist Howard Fuller, who would soon make news of his own with the opening of Malcolm X Liberation University in Durham.

  For all these reasons, McKissick had settled on North Carolina as the home of his new city. But there was still the question of where within the state it would be located. The Blue Ridge Mountains, where he was born and raised, were too remote and inaccessible to attract the industry needed to create jobs. Besides, the Black population in the mountains had never been substantial; in 1968, fewer than 20 percent of Asheville’s residents were nonwhite. The Coastal Plain, on the other hand, was heavily Black, especially in the northeast, where large plantations had been most prevalent and slavery most widespread. But this area, known as the North Carolina “Black Belt,” was remote, in addition to having the most racist and conservative white population in the state. (It was a paradox of slavery that Black people were most oppressed in those areas where their numbers were largest, a consequence of white fears of insurrection.) That left the Piedmont, the vast middle region that separated the mountains from the lowlands. Encompassing the state’s five largest cities—Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and Durham—and more than half its population, the Piedmont was the engine of economic growth in the state. It was home to the textile and furniture industries, the banking sector, and the burgeoning Research Triangle Park, which had recently landed its first major tenant in IBM. It was bisected by four major highways, boasted three commercial airports, and was the most politically moderate area of the state. If you were going to build a new city in North Carolina, especially if you were Black, the Piedmont was where you wanted to be.

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  MCKISSICK KNEW THE region well, having lived in Durham for two decades before moving to New York as head of CORE in 1966. He also knew from conversations with James Rouse that it was important not to reveal his intentions publicly before securing the land. Doing so could generate resistance to his plan and drive up prices as property owners sought to profit from his need for land. So instead of making the initial inquiries himself, he trusted the task to an old colleague, Theaoseus Theaboyd Clayton, known to friends as T.T. Eight years younger than McKissick, Clayton was a self-described “country boy” from Roxboro, a small town in the north-central part of the state. His family owned a large farm that grew tobacco, corn, and wheat, and Clayton spent much of his youth working the fields. But his father was determined to send all seven of his children to college, so Clayton left home at the age of eighteen and enrolled at Johnson C. Smith, an all-Black university in Charlotte. He did well enough there to gain admission to North Carolina College School of Law, the same school McKissick had attended before integrating the law school in Chapel Hill. Clayton worked briefly in McKissick’s office after graduation, then entered into a partnership with a white lawyer in Warrenton, an hour northeast of Durham. An interracial law firm was practically unheard of in those days, but the white lawyer had represented suspected communists before Congress, so no whites would work with him. Clayton took on his own share of unpopular causes, representing Black parents who sued to integrate the Warren County schools and defending activists who were arrested for sitting in the white section of a movie theater. But he also got along well with local officials, developing a reputation as a smart, capable attorney. And he was married to an equally smart, capable woman, Eva M. Clayton, a fellow graduate of Johnson C. Smith who had made headlines earlier in the year when she ran for Congress. She lost to the incumbent, Lawrence H. (“L.H.”) Fountain, who had held the seat for eighteen years. But her campaign boosted Black voter registration, and by winning nearly a third of the vote she established herself as an important new voice in North Carolina politics.

  As an attorney who frequently handled land sales, Clayton was familiar with the region’s real estate market, and he began making calls on McKissick’s behalf. His first stop was a five-hundred-acre farm in Halifax County, on the eastern edge of the Piedmont. Owned by a prominent Black family that had made money in the funeral business, the farm was fertile and flat, with a large fish pond at its center. But when Clayton described the property to McKissick, the latter was unimpressed. “I don’t know, T.T.,” he said. “We need a lot of land.” So Clayton contacted a state agricultural agent, who told him about a place called the Circle P Ranch, an 1,800-acre estate whose owner was eager to sell. Once a tobacco farm, the Circle P had in recent years been used for timber and cattle. It featured several creeks, a handful of barns and outbuildings, and an old white mansion on a hill. Best of all, it was located in Clayton’s backyard—in Warren County, nine miles west of Warrenton.

  Named after Joseph Warren, a Massachusetts doctor who died in the Battle of Bunker Hill, Warren County had at one point been the richest and most influential county in the state. Situated just west of the fall line that divides the Piedmont from the Coastal Plains, it had been home to the state’s largest tobacco and cotton plantations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its heyday, it had produced four governors, six state attorneys general, three state supreme court justices, five tobacco magnates, and the designer of the original Confederate flag. It was a destination, “the kind of place where Southern aristocrats came to relax,” in the words of one journalist. “They bathed in the local hot springs and stayed at the Panacea Springs Resort and the Shocco Springs Hotel.” Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New-York
Tribune, was married there, and Robert E. Lee’s second daughter, Annie Carter Lee, was buried there.

  By 1968, though, Warren County was a ghost of its former self. The tobacco and cotton farms had withered in the face of falling prices and foreign competition, while new technologies had eliminated many of the old field jobs. So, as was the case across the South, young Black men and women had headed north in ever larger numbers. They traveled by whatever means they could, the poorest by bus, the richest by car, and nearly everyone else by train. Most from Warren County took the latter, carrying a few belongings, a little money, and enough chicken to last the journey. It was this last detail that gave the train north its nickname: the Chickenbone Special. As one writer described its passengers, “Often they board with little more than the clothes on their backs, the paper bag of fried chicken, and an abiding faith that everything will be all right once they get North to where the jobs are.… Behind them is the near-certainty of nothing. Ahead, the nothing is at least still a gamble.”

  The Black exodus had a devastating impact on the South, draining it of the cheap labor it had come to depend on. In 1900, Black people made up a third of the region’s population, and 90 percent of all Black Americans lived in the South. By 1970, only 19 percent of southerners were Black, and almost half of all Blacks lived outside the South. The pattern in Warren County was similar. From 1950 to 1970, one-third of the county’s residents left, reducing the population from twenty-four thousand to just under sixteen thousand—the largest decline in the state. Most of the emigrants were Black, but many whites moved away, too. For those who remained, the situation was bleak. The median family income of five thousand dollars was about half the national figure, and one in three residents lived below the poverty level, making it the third poorest county in North Carolina and placing it in the bottom 10 percent of counties nationwide. The situation was even worse for Black residents, more than half of whom lived in poverty. If you visited the home of a Black family in Warren County in 1968, there was a 59 percent chance it lacked a proper kitchen, a 65 percent chance it lacked an indoor toilet, and a 68 percent chance it lacked connection to a public sewer or septic tank. As a reporter for the Washington Post noted upon touring the area a year later, “You have to study each shack to tell whether it is abandoned or not; until it falls down, an empty shack looks very little different from one that may house a large family.”

  The history of the Circle P Ranch mirrored that of the county at large. Originally named “Purchase Patent,” it had once been a prosperous tobacco plantation owned by William Duke (progenitor of the famous Duke family) and worked by nearly a hundred enslaved people—fifty-three of them kept by William, forty-five by his son Green Duke. It was Green Duke who built the manor house in 1781, then passed it down to his son, Louis Duke, before the entire estate was sold to a planter named William Twitty in 1814. Renamed High Oaks, the plantation continued to profit from slavery until the Civil War, during which it served as a hospital for Confederate soldiers. In 1909, the Twitty family sold the estate to Samuel J. Satterwhite, a successful farmer who served briefly in the North Carolina legislature and fought bitterly against desegregation. He sold it to a lumber company in 1953, and seven years later it was acquired by Leon Perry, a businessman from the nearby town of Henderson, who changed the name to the Circle P Ranch (the P stood for Perry). By this time, the tobacco market was saturated, and the federal government was paying farmers not to plant the crop. So after stripping much of the land of timber, Perry used a quarter of the property to grow corn and the rest to graze cattle. For a while the estate was profitable again, and Perry had one of the largest beef operations in the state, with more than 2,500 head of cattle. But when the ranch started to lose money, Perry began looking for a buyer, which is how he and T. T. Clayton were introduced in the fall of 1968.

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  THE TWO MEN met at a small airfield near Henderson, where they climbed into a single-engine plane with Perry at the controls. The day was sunny and clear, and as they flew low over the sprawling ranch Clayton could see the white manor house surrounded by a cluster of barns and sheds, a network of red-clay roads, a few crooked creeks, and a dark herd of cows, like the shadow of a cloud, moving across the fields. Clayton was ecstatic, believing he had found exactly what McKissick was looking for. But Perry seemed puzzled. Although it wasn’t unheard of for Black farmers to own large tracts of land in this part of the state, Clayton, well-educated and dressed in a business suit, clearly wasn’t a farmer. Nor did he seem interested in lumber or cattle, the two other ways to profit from the land. At one point Perry’s curiosity got the better of him, and he asked directly, “Hey, Clayton, who wants to buy this? What are you going to do with it?” Clayton simply gestured toward the rolling hills in the distance and offered a vague response. “That sure would make a beautiful golf course,” he said.

  After viewing the property, Clayton called McKissick and described what he had found. This time, McKissick was intrigued. In addition to Perry’s 1,800 acres, there was an adjacent tract of 1,400 acres they could acquire, as well as several smaller lots. All told, Clayton estimated, there were more than 5,000 acres available—an area slightly smaller than Reston and about a third the size of Manhattan. That was more than enough land for a city, so McKissick flew down a few days later to inspect the property himself. Clayton picked him up at the Raleigh-Durham airport, and they drove north on US Route 1 in Clayton’s long blue Oldsmobile. In those days, the suburbs north of Raleigh consisted mainly of farms and woodlands, and the monotony of the drive was broken only by the occasional crossroads community. Passing one of these junctions, they spotted a gorgeous spread of land sloping down toward the Tar River, a coffee-colored ditch that once ferried barges loaded with pine tar. “Is that it?” McKissick asked eagerly. “No, that’s not it,” Clayton replied. “But you’ll like it.”

  And McKissick did. Using a survey Clayton had obtained from the register of deeds in Warrenton, the two men walked and drove the clay roads crisscrossing the property. It was just as Clayton had described: gentle hills, winding creeks, piney woods, and open pastures. There was a massive trench that held more than 1,700 tons of cow fodder, several large grain bins, and an assortment of farm machinery. At the center of the ranch, on the crest of a long incline, sat the old manor house. For several years, Perry’s foreman, A. L. “Bud” Meek, had lived there with his son “Butch.” They had since moved out, and the house was now in a state of disrepair, with broken windows, a sagging porch, and overgrown bushes blocking the entrance. Nearby stood a row of dilapidated outbuildings that looked as if they might once have stored food or supplies. But knowing the history of Warren County, McKissick and Clayton suspected they had also housed a different type of chattel. As Clayton put it, “It didn’t take much imagination to know that a tract of land that large was owned by people who owned slaves.”

  In assessing the property, McKissick was aware of the challenges he would face building his city on the Circle P Ranch. For one thing, the land had none of the infrastructure needed to support a city. There was only one paved road in the area, and the clay roads were so dusty and rutted they were nearly impassable. The property had no water or sewer system, relying instead on wells and septic tanks, and there were only a few electrical wires running to the house and the main barn. As for Warren County, it didn’t have much to offer, either. In addition to its poverty and shrinking tax base, the county’s population was largely uneducated: 70 percent of adults hadn’t graduated from high school, and only 178 residents in the entire county had a college degree. The school system was mediocre at best, and few residents had the skills needed by the industries McKissick hoped to attract. The county seat, Warrenton, had a population of less than two thousand. And although Blacks made up two-thirds of the county’s population, whites controlled all the local institutions—the county commission, the school board, and the local police department, which had only recently hired its first Black officer. There was also a long traditi
on of white intimidation and violence, a legacy of the slavery era, during which whites were significantly outnumbered by Blacks. In 1802, fears of a Black uprising had swept the area, and it was only eighty miles away, in Southampton County, Virginia, that Nat Turner led his rebellion in 1831. In the twentieth century, whites had held on to power through other means. As happened elsewhere in the South, Black people in Warren County had been largely disenfranchised through discriminatory application of voter literacy tests. In 1939, only 110 Blacks were registered to vote, compared to 1,270 whites. And in the 1968 presidential campaign, the segregationist George Wallace beat Democrat Hubert Humphrey in the county by one vote, with Nixon receiving just one-eighth of the vote total. Warren County was also the site of significant Klan activity, a fact made glaringly clear by a sign on a nearby highway that read “You Are in the Heart of Klan Country.”

  For all its drawbacks, McKissick saw several advantages to Warren County. First, land was cheap, which was important if you needed a lot of it. Perry was asking only $215 per acre, and even if the price increased for subsequent tracts, it was unlikely to reach the $1,500 per acre paid by James Rouse in Columbia. Labor was also cheap; manufacturing wages in Warren County were below the state average, which was itself below the national average. And thanks to the state’s aggressive right-to-work laws, union membership was the lowest in the nation, making the site attractive to industry.