by Thomas Healy
A sign greeting visitors to North Carolina in 1968.
Then there was its location. Although more than an hour away from the nearest city of any size (Raleigh, fifty-seven miles to the south, had 122,000 people, while Durham, fifty-four miles to the southwest, had 95,000), Warren County was situated in the desirable Piedmont industrial corridor. Within a five-hundred-mile radius, there were thirteen states, sixty-eight metropolitan areas, and a third of the nation’s population. Access to transportation was also good. The Circle P Ranch was adjacent to Route 1, a rural highway once known as “America’s Main Street” because it served as the primary corridor from Key West to the Canadian border. Route 1 had since been overshadowed by the massive Interstate 95, which lay thirty miles to the east, but hundreds of trucks still rumbled past the ranch every day. In addition, the new Interstate 85, which was slated to connect Montgomery, Alabama, with Petersburg, Virginia, was under construction less than a mile away. Perhaps most promising, the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad skirted the property’s western boundary. Providing passenger and freight service from Florida to Washington, DC, the Seaboard Coast Line was the eighth largest railway in the nation, with more than nine thousand miles of track. If McKissick could persuade railroad management to build a siding at Soul City, he would have a direct shipping line to the entire Southeast.
The Circle P Ranch also had its share of natural resources. In addition to its three creeks—Rocky, Fishing, and Matthews—the property was just a few miles east of Kerr Lake, a fifty-thousand-acre reservoir created by a dam on the Roanoke River. One of the largest reservoirs in the Southeast—roughly the size of Cincinnati—Kerr Lake could supply water for both residents and industry, while also serving as a recreational site for boating, swimming, and fishing.
Finally, there was the history of the property. McKissick soon confirmed what he had suspected on his first visit: the ranch had once been a slave plantation, where Black men and women were passed down from white fathers to their sons. He also discovered that the estate had been owned at one point by Samuel Satterwhite, the segregationist legislator. For McKissick, there was a satisfying symbolism in building his city on such desecrated land. “I have wanted this land for a long time,” he later told a reporter. “It belonged to the family of a state legislator who fought integration like a tiger.”
Once McKissick settled on the Circle P Ranch, there was the question of how to go about purchasing it discreetly. In conversations with James Rouse, he learned how Rouse had acquired the property for Columbia through a series of shell companies with vague names such as “Alaska Iron Mines Company” and “Premble, Inc.” McKissick now employed a similar strategy. First, Clayton negotiated a purchase price of $390,000 with Perry. Then, on December 19, Clayton signed an agreement with Perry, paying $4,000 for a sixty-day option to purchase the land. Finally, Clayton and McKissick entered into a contract whereby Clayton assigned his interest in the option to McKissick Enterprises. Both men being lawyers, they knew that for the assignment to be valid McKissick had to give Clayton something in return, even if it was only a nominal amount. They agreed on the sum of $10, McKissick wrote Clayton a check, and both men signed their names to the contract.
• 6 •
“Integration Blackwards”
McKissick’s option to purchase the Circle P Ranch was good until February 19, 1969, and in a perfect world he would have completed the deal before going public with his plans. That’s what James Rouse had done in 1963, unveiling his proposal for Columbia at a county board meeting after having secretly acquired title to over fourteen thousand acres. But circumstances forced McKissick to follow a bolder course. While scouting land in North Carolina, he had been in touch with Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. In addition to regulating farm prices and food safety, the Agriculture Department was responsible for the economic health of rural America. And Freeman, the former governor of Minnesota, cared deeply about issues of poverty and social justice. During his tenure as secretary, he had helped establish the food stamp and school breakfast programs; had hired William Seabron, a former Urban League official, to eradicate racial discrimination within the department; and had even hosted a conference on the building of new towns across rural America. Thus, when Freeman read McKissick’s proposal in late 1968, he offered to do whatever he could to help. The problem was, Freeman would soon be out of a job. On January 20, Richard Nixon would take the oath of office, and a new secretary would be appointed, one who might not be as sympathetic to McKissick’s idea. So McKissick made a gutsy decision. In spite of the fact that he didn’t yet have title to the land—and hadn’t even secured a loan to pay for it—he called a press conference to announce his plans.
It took place on Monday, January 13, in Freeman’s office in Washington, DC. McKissick, looking modish in a dark blazer over a white turtleneck sweater, sat behind a large desk arrayed with microphones. Freeman, in a conservative gray suit and black-rimmed glasses, sat next to him, while off to the side stood Seabron, Gordon Carey, T. T. Clayton, and several other McKissick aides. A small pack of television and newspaper reporters crowded into the room, waiting expectantly. Though no longer head of CORE, McKissick was still one of the most prominent—and quotable—Black leaders in the country, and journalists knew better than to miss one of his announcements.
They didn’t have to wait long. After a brief word of thanks to Freeman and his department, McKissick dropped a bombshell: he was planning a new city in rural North Carolina, a city “built and owned by black people.” It would be named Soul City and would be located in Warren County, an hour north of Raleigh-Durham. McKissick Enterprises had already secured an option on 1,800 acres of land, in an area “blessed with beautiful scenery and numerous creeks and lakes.” Soon, McKissick and his staff would begin planning and developing the city, which would have a population of eighteen thousand people within ten years.
McKissick (center) with T. T. Clayton (left) and Orville Freeman (right) at the press conference announcing the launch of Soul City.
In making his announcement, McKissick framed Soul City as a response, and a partial solution, to the urban crisis. That crisis had not begun in the cities, he argued. Instead, its roots lay in “the migratory pattern of people seeking to escape racism, oppression, and exploitation.” Soul City would help arrest that pattern by creating new jobs and opportunities in one of the very regions Black people were fleeing. “We are doing more than building a town,” he declared. “We will be helping to put new life into a depressed area where the median income is less than $2,000 per family—and we will be helping to stem the flood of migrants to the already over-crowded and decaying cities.”
When it came to the racial makeup of the city, McKissick insisted it would “be open to residents of all colors, because we do not intend to adopt the white man’s racism.” He also made clear that he welcomed the participation of white America and anticipated support from the federal government, the state of North Carolina, and the nation’s industrialists. But he left little doubt that the project was designed primarily to benefit Blacks, especially the poor and unemployed. He boasted that Soul City would create “new careers for black people,” promote “the development of talent heretofore never employed or afforded opportunity,” and enable Blacks to “determine their own futures.” “White men have built other cities,” he added. “Soul City will be an attempt to move into the future, a future where black people welcome white people as equals.”
* * *
MCKISSICK’S ANNOUNCEMENT MADE a splash. It was covered by all three television networks on the evening news, including The Huntley-Brinkley Report, which dedicated a generous two and a half minutes to the story. The Washington Post published an article on its front page, while wire reports appeared in the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and other major newspapers. For the most part, the coverage was positive. Press accounts emphasized the pledges of assistance McKissick had received from various entities, including Freeman’s office, the Rouse
Company, and the planning and architectural departments at the University of North Carolina, Columbia University, and MIT. They also repeated, without verification, McKissick’s claim that the Nixon administration supported his plan and that four major industries had already expressed interest in building plants in Soul City.
In the days that followed, however, a tone of skepticism and hostility seeped into the coverage, particularly on the opinion pages. The editors of the News & Observer in Raleigh conceded that McKissick’s idea was “fascinating” and would appeal to “people on all sides of the race issue who wish to see blacks running their own enterprises for their own benefit.” But they found grounds for “some very justifiable pessimism.” Not only would McKissick have to secure money to develop the land, he would have to recruit industry, train a largely unskilled workforce, and provide transportation, utilities, and a market for goods and services. “If Soul City’s planners have looked reality straight in the eye,” the editors cautioned, “they realize how difficult it is going to be to make this dream come true.” The Charlotte Observer was equally dubious. Describing Warren County as “an economic desert island,” it noted that the site McKissick had chosen was far from any “job-creating economic center.” “Perhaps ‘soul’ can create a town where none exists and none seems likely to arise otherwise,” the paper allowed. But absent “a massive, coordinated, government-backed” effort, Soul City was a gamble against the longest of odds.
The only thing the mainstream media seemed to fear more than the failure of Soul City was the possibility that it might succeed. Despite McKissick’s claim that the town would be open to all races, many news outlets viewed the project as an experiment in separatism. The headline in the Warren Record blared, “All-Negro City Planned for Warren County Site,” while ABC News described Soul City as an “all-black settlement.” If such an experiment were to flourish, critics warned, it would have dire consequences for race relations in America. “A new bastion of racial segregation is the last thing this nation needs,” argued the editors of the Greensboro Daily News. “It would encourage racial segregation just when most Americans have at last accepted that their greatest hopes lie in an integrated society.”
Perhaps the most damning critique—and the one that would prove most consequential—came from Claude Sitton, recently appointed as editorial director of the News & Observer in Raleigh. A native of Georgia, Sitton had covered the civil rights movement for the New York Times from 1958 to 1964 before serving a four-year stint as the paper’s national editor. Within the world of newspapers, Sitton was a legend, having taken over the “race beat” for the Times just as the movement was gathering momentum and having recognized, before many other journalists, the need for in-depth, continuous coverage of the subject. Driving and flying around the South from his home in Atlanta, he had reported on nearly all the major moments of the struggle—the sit-ins of 1960, the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Albany campaign, the Birmingham campaign, the showdown at Ole Miss, Freedom Summer. Indeed, if one wanted an eyewitness account of the movement’s central years, one could simply read Sitton’s articles from beginning to end.
Slight of build and prematurely bald, Sitton looked more like a bookkeeper than an intrepid correspondent. But beneath his unassuming appearance and low-key demeanor was a tough, dogged reporter who refused to parrot what white officials told him, instead venturing into Black communities to find the truth himself. A stickler for the facts who believed reporters should be objective, he didn’t mistake that objectivity for blindness. He often portrayed civil rights protesters as well-dressed, polite, and respectable, while describing their tormentors as “teenage boys with duck-tail haircuts.” In one of his most chilling reports, he recounted firsthand the efforts of police and angry whites to break up a voter registration meeting at a church in rural Georgia on a summer night in 1962. Sitting in the front row with two other reporters, Sitton recorded every detail of the intimidation campaign: how one policeman fingered his revolver while another slapped a heavy flashlight against his palm; how the officers took down the names of those in attendance and warned they wouldn’t be able to protect them from the restless crowd outside; how the crowd shined lights in their faces as the attendees filed out into the darkness, then jeered when the reporters discovered that one of their tires was flat; how the reporters were followed for eighteen miles by a carload of whites before they stopped to write down the car’s license plate number, only to discover the plate had been bent over to obscure it; and finally, how the reporters took their car to a mechanic the next day and learned that the gas tank had been filled with sand and the air valve on the flattened tire had been slashed with a knife.
Because of his sympathetic and thoughtful coverage of the movement, Sitton was widely admired by civil rights activists, many of whom carried his card as a talisman against violence and police abuse. He was equally respected by his peers in the press. In their book The Race Beat, journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff described Sitton as the standard-bearer, “the best there was in covering, exposing, and interpreting the race story in the South.” But as a Georgian, Sitton could also be defensive, pushing back against the assumption that all southerners were bigots. When James Baldwin criticized his review of a book about the civil rights struggle for suggesting that the author had overstated the extent of southern racism, Sitton responded forcefully, insisting that the White Citizens’ Councils that had formed to oppose Brown v. Board of Education “do not reign supreme in all areas of the Deep South.” He also argued that Baldwin’s view of the South as a monolith was simplistic, asserting that the celebrated writer “would find more dissent on closer examination.”
Burned out and tired of being away from his family, Sitton gave up the race beat in 1964 and moved to New York. As the Times’s national editor, he continued to oversee the paper’s coverage of the civil rights movement and occasionally weighed in with his own analysis, as he had done in the wake of King’s assassination. But Sitton disliked the internal politics at the Times and missed his native South. So when the News & Observer offered him the job of editorial director and vice president in the spring of 1968, he eagerly accepted. In his new job, he oversaw both the news and editorial sections of the N&O, as it was known, as well as the news department of its evening sister paper, the Raleigh Times. He brought to both papers the same insistence on accurate and thorough reporting, the same commitment to integrity, and the same determination to hold public officials accountable. But as head of the N&O’s editorial page, he had the power to shape opinion more directly. He also wrote a weekly column on local and national affairs, in which, on January 19, he shared his views on Soul City.
Claude Sitton in 1965, one year after he gave up the “race beat” to become the New York Times national editor.
Titled “Soul City’s Plan or Wilkins’ Way?,” Sitton’s column juxtaposed McKissick’s announcement with a statement issued the same week by Roy Wilkins, who had denounced a call by Black students for all-Black departments and dormitories on college campuses. Sitton acknowledged that, contrary to what the students proposed, Soul City would not be formally or legally segregated. But he suggested this was little more than a ruse to maintain eligibility for federal funding. In spirit, he argued, Soul City was a descendant of other separatist ventures, from the Amish enclaves of Pennsylvania to Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa campaign. “Such undertakings share an unfortunate characteristic,” Sitton charged. “They are ‘sociological sports.’ They are spawned by an interruption of the normal processes of human relationships, a sickness that infects both parent and offspring.” Wilkins, by contrast, evinced a healthy and productive attitude toward race, Sitton argued. The longtime head of the NAACP had not moderated his demands for freedom and equality. He was still “an acid critic of American society,” still insisted on the need for change, for “a sharp alteration in methods” and an “acceleration” of progress. But there was “none of the rejection, the defeatism and withdrawal in the Wilkins initi
ative that one finds in that of McKissick,” Sitton wrote. “Instead, it is characterized by faith in America and in America’s ability to change.” This was important for whites to recognize, for ultimately they would help determine the path that Black people decided to take. And in Sitton’s view, white society faced a clear choice: “It can drift along in the indifference that has bred Soul City and less benign social ills or it can show Negroes through constructive action that Wilkins’ faith in the system is justified.”
Sitton’s column—and the criticism it reflected—infuriated McKissick. When asked at his press conference whether his plan was part of a trend toward separatism, he had responded coolly: “No, I think it does the same thing as the Chinese have done in New York. They built a Chinese area—Chinatown. It’s a beautiful section of the town that I admire.” But as critics pressed the claim, he became increasingly agitated, convinced that the media were deliberately mischaracterizing his plan. Speaking to a group of students at North Carolina College, in Durham, he blasted pundits’ use of the word “separatist,” calling it an example of “the semantics of racism—the language the man uses to divide and conquer.” He also pushed back against the claim that Black people were the ones thwarting integration. “The real separatists are those white people who years ago moved to the suburbs,” he declared.
Still, he couldn’t escape the perception that Soul City would be all-Black, if not in concept then at least in reality. Nor could he deny that he was partially to blame. Although he consistently maintained that Soul City would welcome whites, his rhetoric seemed designed to scare them away. At one press conference he declared, “Black people will own, control, and develop this city,” while at another he announced, “We intend to be a majority, and we intend to control the new town.” He also seemed uncertain about how to describe Soul City, using different language depending on his audience. Sometimes he called it “black-inspired,” other times “black-built,” and still others “black-oriented.” Rarely did he call it “integrated.” This was no accident. McKissick rejected the label “integrated” because it implied a preexisting policy of segregation. In his mind, there was no need to “integrate” Soul City, since it had never been segregated. “Liberals are all hung up on integration or segregation,” he complained to the Minneapolis Star. “This is neither integration nor segregation, but letting black people do what they damn please, and go where they please.”