Soul City

by Thomas Healy

  He made a similar point in conversations with the Rouse Company. When a planner there questioned whether his approach was consistent with integration, McKissick responded sharply: “Everybody thinks of integration on white people’s terms. Integration is fine when it’s 80 percent white and 20 percent black. Nobody can conceive of integration where the blacks constitute 80 percent and the whites constitute 20 percent.” In the end, McKissick conceded, white racism would probably make Soul City a predominantly Black town. But he didn’t care if it was all Black or half Black or somewhere in between. What he cared about was giving Black people the same kind of opportunity and self-determination that white people took for granted. “The concept of Soul City is just as American as apple pie,” he told the Rouse planner.

  Some observers understood what McKissick meant. Shortly after his initial press conference, he received a letter from Henry H. Parker, a classics instructor at the University of Illinois who wanted to build a Black city in Iowa called King Town. In his letter, Parker referred to the work of Morris Milgram and Byron Johnson, two white developers who were trying to create an integrated community in Denver called Sunburst City. “These cats are groovy,” Parker wrote, “but they’re concerned with what I call ‘Integration Whitewards.’ I’m concerned, and it seems that you are too, with ‘Integration Blackwards.’ This means that we black folks make the plans, and call the shots.”

  McKissick concurred wholeheartedly. As he explained in his response to Parker, “We are convinced that if black people are to be liberated, they will have to liberate themselves. This is what we intend to do and we do not intend to fail.”

  * * *

  IF THE MAINSTREAM press viewed McKissick’s plan as too radical in its quest for Black control, some commentators thought it too conservative, relying, as it did, on the existing capitalist structure. Writing in the North Carolina Anvil, a progressive weekly in Durham, a journalist named Elizabeth Tornquist argued that Soul City, like any free-enterprise venture, would make its developers rich while leaving its workers poor. “Capitalism has always worked on the theory that the man who invests capital gets a larger return while the man who has only labor to invest gets a small return—enough, in the American system, to buy a house with a long-term mortgage, a car on the installment plan, furniture on credit, and plenty of hotdogs and cheap department store clothes for the children,” Tornquist wrote. “But the system has rarely enabled men who invest their labor to purchase with it any sizeable stake in the company. It’s difficult to see how the system, operating on the traditional principles, is going to achieve any different results in Soul City.”

  McKissick had an answer to this criticism, and on February 12—the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth—he unveiled it. Appearing at a press conference in Washington, DC, he explained more eloquently than ever before why it was essential for Black people to participate in the capitalist system. “People who teach economics are mostly white,” he told the reporters gathered before him, “but the people who understand economics are mostly black. We know we’re poor, and more important, we know why we’re poor. We’re poor because we don’t own any of that thing—capital—that produces most of the wealth.” Slavery had produced wealth, he noted, which was why Blacks had been enslaved in the first place. But like all laborers, they had been denied a share of that wealth. “Slavery taught us who had leisure, who had freedom, who had dignity. Not the slave, but the slave-owner. Not the sharecropper, but the landowner. Not the employee, but the capital owner.”

  That was why Soul City would be based on “slave ownership,” McKissick announced, with Black people playing the role of masters. The difference was their “slaves” wouldn’t be “weak and defenseless human beings.” Their “slaves” would be “the non-human things that produce industrial wealth”—factories, stores, apartment buildings, hotels, warehouses, and machines. These “non-human things” would generate jobs, of course, many of which would be held by Black residents. But they would also create opportunities for Blacks to own capital and acquire meaningful wealth, the kind whites had long possessed. “It will take hard physical work to build a city where there is nothing now but woods and pastures,” McKissick acknowledged. “We intend to work, and to work hard. But we do not intend merely to work. We intend to own.”

  Exactly how ordinary workers would acquire a share of capital in Soul City was a separate question. To answer it, McKissick introduced the political economist Louis Kelso, who had worked with CORE in drafting its proposal for community development corporations. Wearing a business suit and a polka-dot bow tie, Kelso didn’t look like a radical. But he described his plan for Soul City as a form of “radical capitalism.” Under the plan, a corporation that decided to build a factory in Soul City would establish an employee trust, which would borrow the money for construction and distribute the company’s profits to employee shareholders. By using the trust form, Kelso maintained, the company could avoid corporate taxes, and employees would pay taxes only on the dividends they collected. The reporters were confused, wondering how Kelso’s plan could be squared with corporate tax laws. They also questioned why a company would agree to turn over its profits to an employee trust. “I know it’s hard to understand,” responded Kelso, explaining that his plan would allow companies to build factories with pretax dollars. Even McKissick acknowledged the scheme was complex and idealistic. “Maybe you’re right. Industry doesn’t have a conscience,” he told the press. “But we’ve had several companies show interest in this.”

  To his supporters, McKissick’s reliance on Kelso’s theories was evidence that Soul City would not be a typical capitalist venture. As David Godschalk, a planning professor at UNC, told a reporter, “It’s halfway between almost socialism and the pure commercial concept of Reston and Columbia.” Still, some critics weren’t satisfied. Writing a few weeks later in Hard Times, another alternative newspaper, Tornquist argued that Kelso’s concept of “radical capitalism” was an illusion that would soon be exposed by the harsh reality of the marketplace. “If McKissick doesn’t make his profit soon, he runs a great risk of making nothing,” she warned. And if that happened, the result would be disastrous. “Soul City will be the same patch of rolling countryside it always was, but instead of being called the Circle P Ranch, it may be known as McKissick’s folly.”

  * * *

  THE MOST POSITIVE reaction to McKissick’s plan came from those he hoped to recruit to Soul City: Blacks themselves. In the days and weeks after his announcement, the Black press covered the story closely, with prominent articles appearing in the New York Amsterdam News, the Chicago Daily Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, the New Pittsburgh Courier, and the Los Angeles Sentinel. Some Black papers responded directly to the doubts being expressed in the white press. The editors of the Carolina Times, in Durham, warned skeptics “to go slow before they conclude that the objective will never be reached.” McKissick was not some “fool” with an “ill-conceived idea” but a “dynamic” and “intelligent” leader who knew how to get things done. As to the merits of his plan, the paper was also supportive. The plight of Blacks in Warren County was “pathetic,” it asserted. No matter how hard they worked, they had never been given a say in their government. Soul City would change that, providing opportunity and autonomy for Black people throughout the region. “It is our hope therefore that every intelligent Negro citizen of the state, as well as others, will do everything possible to aid the Floyd B. McKissick Enterprise in the worthy goal it has set out to achieve.”

  For the most part, they did. A few days after McKissick’s initial press conference, a group of Black schoolchildren on Manhattan’s Lower East Side began a sidewalk collection to raise money for the new city. A few weeks later, both Howard University and North Carolina College offered their support for the project. And as news of McKissick’s plan spread, it became clear that he was not the only southern transplant who longed to return home. In cities throughout the North, there were thousands—tens of
thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands—of Blacks who had not found what they were looking for. They had moved to Baltimore (or New York or Chicago or Detroit) because, as the saying went, it was better than hell. But as more and more Black southerners arrived in the North, conditions became increasingly desperate. Between 1940 and 1960, the Black population of New York City increased two and a half times, yet 85 percent of the newcomers were crowded into racial ghettos. The new migrants struggled to find work and housing, often paying a premium for the worst apartments. In the words of one journalist, “Gradually it became clear that Baltimore and Hell were often the same place.” And so “the word began trickling back to the farms: stay where you are. The city is no place for people like us. The city is changing. You ain’t gonna like it. Man, it ain’t human up there.”

  It wasn’t just that the North was inhospitable. Many Black transplants were homesick for the South. They missed the scent of honeysuckle in summer, the call of whippoorwills at night, the feel of cool earth in their hands. Most of all, they missed the sense of belonging, of community, of rootedness, which not even the suffering and persecution they had endured in the South could destroy. This helps explain why so much of the Black migration north during the twentieth century was not permanent. Instead it had a temporary, tentative quality to it, with many migrants returning home shortly after leaving and then repeating the experiment over and over until they either became accustomed to the North or resolved to stay in the South for good. This also helps explain why so many migrants sent their children home to live with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. As long as their offspring were being raised in the South, they could pretend their sojourn north was simply an extended leave that would one day allow them to return home.

  McKissick’s plan struck a chord with these transplants, disillusioned by the North and wistful for the South. Soon he was inundated with letters from Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Newark, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and New York City. Some correspondents, such as F. N. Kurtz of Columbia, Missouri, wrote to offer encouragement. “Nothing is impossible after somebody does it,” observed Kurtz, who hailed McKissick as “the Black Man’s Moses.” Others, like Robert E. Martin of Washington, DC, expressed an interest in being part of Soul City. Martin, an architect, and his wife, an unemployed manager, had read about the project and felt a “keen concern” for what McKissick was attempting. “In addition to living in Soul City, N.C., we would like to take part in the overall planning.” John Council, of the Bronx, inquired about investing money in the project; Tody Foster, of Newark, sought work as an advertising writer; and Ronnie Collins, of Queens, sent the lyrics to a song he had written about Soul City:

  We are gone to live in peace and harmonie

  Cause I think that the way God mint for it to be

  Not all the letters came from the North. Waved Ruffin, a school principal from Windsor, North Carolina, wrote to express interest in running a school in Soul City, while Isaac B. Markham, a contractor from Durham who described himself as a “brother of soul,” asked whether he could bid on grading work for the project. Some of the letters were sent to McKissick Enterprises in New York. Other writers simply wrote “Floyd McKissick, Soul City, N.C.” on the envelope, leaving it to the post office to figure out the rest. Those who were from Warren County relied on connections back home to put them in touch with McKissick. One man wrote to Ernest Turner, the owner of a gas station on the other side of the county. The man had left the area eight years earlier and was working as a supermarket manager in Washington. Now he wanted to return home and open a grocery store in Soul City. Could Turner help him out, he asked. Could Turner pull some strings?

  McKissick was overwhelmed by the response. Speaking to reporters during his press conference with Kelso, he boasted about the volume of correspondence. He also reported that, in the weeks since his announcement, a stream of residents from nearby towns and counties had driven over to look at the property. “We could move in two thousand people right away on the basis of the letters we’ve received,” he declared.

  Not all Black leaders were sold on the plan. In early January, McKissick had sent a copy of his proposal to Whitney Young, executive director of the Urban League. McKissick and Young had often sparred over the direction of the civil rights movement, with Young urging a cautious, moderate approach and McKissick pushing a militant, confrontational agenda. Especially after the rise of Black Power, the two men had taken wildly divergent paths (though Young had moved closer to McKissick’s position at the 1968 CORE convention). But McKissick did not hold grudges or let disagreements get in the way of personal relationships. Besides, he needed as many allies as possible to get Soul City off the ground. So his cover letter was all smiles, sending his best wishes to Young’s “lovely wife” and suggesting that the Urban League could “play a major part” in the project.

  Young was not swayed. Responding the same day as McKissick’s announcement, he wrote that he had “serious questions” about the philosophy behind the proposal. Instead of building a new city, he wondered, why didn’t McKissick focus his energies on one of the many Black communities already in existence, such as Harlem, East Baltimore, or Watts? Doing so would eliminate the need to purchase land and attract residents, “since they are already there and anxiously waiting for you or someone to lead them to becoming the model prototype of how beautiful a black-run city can be.” The Urban League had worked with a number of these communities, he added, and would gladly assist McKissick in revitalizing them. But “until we have made these cities succeed, I cannot get excited about starting another one.”

  Young’s letter raised an obvious question. With so many Black communities struggling across the country, how could McKissick justify spending valuable resources building a new one? McKissick had an answer to this question, too. In his mind, there were psychological benefits to building something new, benefits that could spark the kind of creative, unconventional thinking that had inspired the civil rights movement itself. He agreed with Young that existing communities should not be forgotten and that Black leaders had a duty to address the problems of the urban poor. He had been as sensitive to those problems as anyone, launching renewal projects in Baltimore and Cleveland as head of CORE. But Young’s insistence that all resources be pooled into one pot was “peculiar,” he wrote, coming from someone who often “applauded diversity in methodology.” In any case, McKissick argued, the land for Soul City was cheap, and it would ultimately cost less to build a new city than to resuscitate a dying one because he would not be burdened by the mistakes of the past.

  While Young privately raised questions about Soul City, some Black leaders took their concerns public. Gordon B. Hancock, a sociology professor at Virginia Union University, offered a scathing assessment of Soul City. In a column for the Norfolk Journal and Guide, he accused McKissick of selling his race “down the stream to the segregationists for a mess of pottage—for a sop, if you please!” After fighting Jim Crow for a hundred years, Hancock argued, it would be suicide for Black people to embrace separatism now. “Let us hope that the Soul City project will die ‘abornin,’” he wrote. “As soon as a Soul City is founded, if the hand-out is lucrative, there will be further Heart Cities, Head Cities, Hand Cities, Finger Cities, Big Toe Cities, Little Toe Cities, and so on!”

  Stephen J. Wright, the gray-haired president of the United Negro College Fund, sounded a similar note. In a debate on the subject of all-Black dormitories and academic departments, Wright denounced separatism in all forms. Asked whether this included Soul City, he responded affirmatively: “That, too, is just another ruse to disappoint and delude the ignorant.”

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  OF ALL THE reactions to McKissick’s announcement, the one that mattered most was the reaction in Warren County. After all, that’s where he planned to build his city. And although he didn’t need permission to buy the land, he would need the approval of the Warren County Board of Commissioners to develop it. He would al
so need the support of local officials and businessmen to attract industry, improve the region’s infrastructure, and ensure that Soul City was accepted by the larger community. So in the days and weeks after his announcement, McKissick and his staff watched anxiously as Warren County digested the news.

  The initial reaction was mainly surprise. McKissick and Clayton had succeeded in keeping their intentions secret as they negotiated the option on the Circle P Ranch. As a result, residents of Warren County learned about Soul City at the same time as everyone else. Some heard about it on the radio while driving their cars. Some heard about it on the evening news. And some, including Amos Capps, chairman of the Warren County Board of Commissioners, heard about it by telephone. In Capps’s case, the call came from the office of his congressman, L. H. Fountain, who wanted to know what all this talk was about a new city. Capps had no idea what Fountain was referring to, and his anger at being kept in the dark showed when he was interviewed later that day. “It did come as a shock to me to learn that a project of this magnitude was being planned without the knowledge of county officials,” he told a reporter. Then, taking a shot at what he viewed as the separatist nature of the venture, he added, “They’ve been trying to get integration for 15 to 20 years and now it looks on the surface as if they are going to get segregation.”