by Thomas Healy
After the surprise wore off, officials and white residents cycled through a range of emotions not unlike the five stages of grief. Some were in denial, doubtful the project would ever come to fruition. Some were bargaining, wondering whether they could dissuade McKissick from following through on his plan. And some had reached the point of acceptance, arguing that if Soul City attracted jobs and industry it would be good for the area. Warrenton mayor W. A. Miles seemed to move through multiple stages in a single statement. “A $25 million project like this is too big in a poverty area like this,” he told reporters. “If Soul City does materialize, though, then the county tax structure would get a real boost.”
But the most prevalent emotions were anger and fear. The anger stemmed from the media’s depiction of Warren County as a wretched and pitiable backwater. To many residents, especially those with deep roots in the county, this portrait was new and unfamiliar. To the Turners and Macons, the Braggs and Dukes—families that had been in the area since the eighteenth century—Warren County was the same charming, genteel place it had always been. Walking down Warrenton’s historic main street, or driving past its stately mansions shaded by magnificent oak trees, they could convince themselves that nothing had changed, that their community was still as fashionable and smart as their parents and grandparents remembered it. So when reporters described what they saw while exploring its back roads or touring its crumbling estates, it came as a shock, like a former starlet seeing herself in the mirror for the first time in fifty years.
One of the most unflattering portraits appeared in the Washington Post. Titled “‘Soul City’ Stirs Its Future Neighbors,” the article was written by a young reporter named Hank Burchard who visited the county in late January. Burchard recounted the same dreary facts that had appeared in other papers: the county’s alarming poverty rate, its dismal median income, its rapidly shrinking population. But whereas most reporters had been content to leave it at that, Burchard went further, offering readers a sense of what those statistics meant in “human terms.” The picture he painted was not pretty. The misery of Warren County, he wrote, “begins to come clear when one travels the dirt roads through the piney woods and sees shack after shack and the swollen-fleshed children with dull eyes that may light with fear of the unknown but seldom with curiosity. Neither brain nor body can grow properly on a diet of hog maws and overcooked greens.”
The distress caused by Burchard’s article was reflected in a response written by Bignall Speed Jones, the sixty-nine-year-old editor of the Warren Record. A descendent of William Duke, who had established the tobacco plantation on which Soul City was slated to be built, Jones was typical of the upper-class whites who had long ruled Warren County and the rest of the rural South. Viewing himself as more enlightened and progressive than the poor whites who worked the fields, he was nonetheless hesitant to disturb the status quo. When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Jones had encouraged Black residents not to push for integration because of the backlash it would generate. “The white people are determined that there shall be no mixed schools in this state,” he wrote at the time. “Before they allow this to happen they will pull down the pillars of the temple.” In recent years Jones had become more outspoken on the issue of equality, but he was not above displaying a casual racism. Asked by a wire reporter whether the Warren Record covered the local Black community, he answered proudly, “I carry all the nigger weddings. It’s a fully integrated paper.”
Like many residents, Jones was troubled by Burchard’s depiction of Warren County. “Just as a mother feels her child is the finest child in the world and resents any suggestion that this is not the true state of affairs, many Warren County residents view their county,” he wrote in his weekly column. But Jones had added cause to be upset, since he had spent half a day with the young reporter, answering questions, introducing him to locals, and showing him the county. In fact, Jones seemed to feel some responsibility for the impressions Burchard had formed. He recounted how the two men had driven around together—“down the No-bottom Road, to Afton, by Jones Spring, Lickskillet, and back to Warrenton”—and informed his readers that Burchard had not taken notes, which may have accounted for his inaccuracies. “We saw many poor farms and some shacks that are a disgrace to the county,” Jones acknowledged. “However, we did not see any persons in rags, or who appeared to be starving. I think it was here that Burchard used his imagination.”
Mixed in with the anger felt by residents was a heavy dose of fear. For if local whites recoiled from the picture of Warren County that was being presented, they were even more frightened about what it might become. Although Black residents already made up two-thirds of the population, far more whites than Blacks were registered to vote, which meant whites dominated the polls and controlled the government. If Soul City succeeded, that electoral dominance would soon end. It was a simple matter of math: an influx of eighteen thousand people would more than double the current population. And if the bulk of those new residents were Black, the percentage of whites would plummet from 33 percent to 15 or 20 percent. No regime, no matter how entrenched or convinced of its own superiority, could permanently maintain power under such circumstances. “I can’t say we don’t deserve it,” one official said when asked about the prospect of a Black takeover, “but I’d hate to see it happen.”
It wasn’t just the threat of becoming politically marginalized that scared white residents. It was the kind of people they feared Soul City would attract. When they heard McKissick describe Soul City as a sanctuary for poor Blacks fleeing the slums of the North, they imagined the worst. In their minds, Warren County would soon be invaded by a horde of violent “riff-raff” and “scum,” bringing crime and disorder and a culture as strange as any foreign nation’s. If that happened, they believed, all the “decent folks” would be forced to leave. McKissick and his staff attempted to assuage such concerns, making clear they were planning to recruit hardworking, law-abiding residents. At a meeting with the Warren County commissioners, Eva Clayton described the project as an “opportunity city” that would attract intellectuals and ambitious young professionals. When asked by Capps, the board’s chairman, whether it would draw hippies and hoodlums, she expressed puzzlement: “That’s definitely not true.” Still, some locals weren’t persuaded. “We ain’t got enough law and order to take care of our own,” declared one resident. “When city rioters come, we’ll have to move away.”
As it turned out, the only person forced to leave was Leon Perry, the businessman who had sold Clayton an option on the land. After it became clear he was the seller, Perry received death threats from his neighbors in Warren County. Not wanting to risk a confrontation, he decided to lie low in Florida until tempers cooled down. Asked upon his return whether he would have agreed to the deal if he had known McKissick’s true intentions, Perry was surprisingly defiant.
“Yes, I would,” he said. “I’m glad someone’s going to do something on it.”
• 7 •
Green Power
In the weeks after his announcement, McKissick embarked on a hectic schedule, working feverishly to get Soul City off the ground. Five days after his press conference, he selected Ifill Johnson Hanchard, one of the country’s leading Black architectural firms, to oversee the city’s design. A few days later, he retained Hammer, Greene, Siler, a prominent consulting firm in Washington, DC, to prepare an economic analysis. He also announced a collaboration with the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina, which agreed to dedicate faculty time and resources to the project. And he traveled the country giving interviews and meeting with various groups and officials, including North Carolina governor Robert Scott and the National Association of Manufacturers, the country’s largest industrial trade organization.
But the most critical task he faced that first month was finding money to buy the land. Throughout all the news conferences and interviews, no one had pressed him on how he i
ntended to pay for the Circle P Ranch. That was a good thing, because McKissick wasn’t sure himself. As of December 1968, McKissick Enterprises had a cash balance of less than three thousand dollars, which wasn’t enough to renew the sixty-day option, let alone cover a down payment. McKissick’s personal finances weren’t much better. Although he had made a comfortable living as a lawyer and as national director of CORE, he and Evelyn had four children, two in college and two attending private schools in New York City. He also had mortgages on several rental properties in Durham and Asheville that could not be quickly or easily liquidated. All of this meant that if McKissick was going to exercise his option on the Circle P Ranch, he’d need outside financing, and he’d need it fast.
He had approached James Rouse in the fall, suggesting that the Rouse Company become involved as a partner or primary investor. But Rouse had his hands full with Columbia, which had broken ground two years earlier and was still in the midst of major construction. Although willing to provide training and advice, he could neither take on the project himself nor offer significant funding. McKissick had also contacted a number of banks, including First Pennsylvania and North Carolina National Bank, as well as Connecticut General Life, which had loaned Rouse more than $25 million to build Columbia. But while these sources didn’t rule out the possibility of future support, none was willing to finance the initial purchase. That left Chase Manhattan as McKissick’s best hope. Chase had already loaned him fifty thousand dollars to launch McKissick Enterprises, which meant it was familiar with his ideas about Black capitalism. It was also familiar with the new-town concept, having invested $10 million in Columbia a few years earlier. So on a winter day in early 1969, McKissick and Gordon Carey took a taxi from their walkup in Harlem to the sixty-story Chase tower in downtown Manhattan to make their pitch.
They met with a team of executives from the construction loan department and Chase’s community development program. Operating informally at the time, the community development program would officially launch later that year with a mandate to aid Black businesses and disadvantaged communities. Though not a charity, the program was designed to provide loans to high-risk projects with social value, which should have made Soul City an ideal applicant. But when McKissick presented his proposal, laying out the long-term plan for Soul City and suggesting a thirty-year repayment schedule, the Chase team was skeptical. They couldn’t loan him $390,000 to develop a city in a cow pasture, they responded. When McKissick reminded them they had invested $10 million in Columbia, the executives tried to explain the difference between the two projects. Columbia was a short drive from two large cities—Baltimore and Washington, DC—while Soul City was an hour from Raleigh-Durham, hardly a major metropolis. Howard County, where Columbia was located, was ripe for development, with several research facilities and federal agencies nearby, while Warren County was an economic wasteland that had been bleeding population for two decades. Finally, James Rouse was an experienced real estate developer who had proven himself on numerous earlier projects, whereas McKissick and his staff were novices, civil rights activists who had never built anything tangible in their lives. McKissick couldn’t dispute the logic of these arguments, so he appealed to the executives personally, insisting that Soul City needed to be built and could be built. “Just work with me,” he pleaded.
Coming from McKissick, it was an awkward plea. For years, he had savaged the banking industry for its racist past and exploitative practices. In a speech at the 1967 Black Power Conference, he had accused “a white, Anglo-Saxon Wall Street” of conspiring “to keep the black man in his place,” while in his book Three-Fifths of a Man he harshly criticized Chase Manhattan for investing in South Africa and providing the economic base that made apartheid possible. He also attacked Chase’s founder, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and the other “robber barons”—Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J. Pierpont Morgan—for building their fortunes on the backs of the poor who “toiled in their mills and sweatshops.” “By monopolizing the wealth and resources of the country, these families are probably the one group most responsible for the status quo,” McKissick wrote. “They are the one group—these so-called philanthropists—most responsible for denying Black People the rights of self-determination, the acquisition of power and the control of their own communities.… They, more than anyone, are the enemy.”
Yet now here he was, in the gleaming Chase tower, at the heart of Wall Street, pleading with the enemy for money. In truth, there was nothing unusual about this. Civil rights leaders had long depended for survival on the patronage of the very people whose business practices they blamed for the condition of Black America. McKissick himself had been in this position many times, and although he didn’t enjoy it, he had always been self-consciously pragmatic in his approach. When more radical members of CORE objected to taking money from the Ford Foundation to fund the “Target City” project in Cleveland, McKissick had pointed out that the group had little choice: without the foundation’s support, the Cleveland project would never get off the drawing board. He also recognized that banks and investors had tremendous authority in society and that policy makers often followed their lead. “They are the people with the influence to force other sectors of society to relinquish power,” he explained.
Just because McKissick was willing to accept money from the rich, however, didn’t mean he thought highly of their motives for supporting civil rights. “They do so to salve their guilt and sense of responsibility to the poor exploited by their corporations,” he wrote. “They seem to feel that such philanthropy somehow absolves their sins and guarantees their moral right to their remaining millions.” So when his personal plea to the Chase executives was met with silence, McKissick played on their sense of guilt, delivering a lecture on the plight of the Black poor and the obligation of white banks to help out. “You owe it,” he told them bluntly.
The Chase team didn’t reject McKissick’s request on the spot, but he wasn’t optimistic about his chances. Shortly after leaving the meeting, he called T. T. Clayton in North Carolina. “Those sons of bitches aren’t going to lend me any money,” he fumed. But McKissick had been more effective than he realized. Not long after that call, Clayton received another call, this one from an executive at Chase. “I know this is your friend, but he just made everybody mad,” the executive said. “But in the end, we decided we’re going to let him have it.” He told Clayton that Chase had a relationship with a bank in Lumberton, North Carolina, 150 miles south of Warrenton. At ten o’clock the next morning, a bank officer would meet Clayton there with a certified check for two hundred thousand dollars—less than McKissick had requested, but still a good start. Stunned by the news, Clayton called McKissick’s home in New York and reached his wife. “Evelyn, where’s Floyd?” he said, to which she replied skeptically, “T.T., what do you want with him?” “I’ve got good news,” he assured her, so she told him that McKissick had driven to the state university in Binghamton to teach a class on the Constitution. Reached in Binghamton later that day, McKissick was as shocked as Clayton. “I never thought we were going to get anything,” he said. “I’m coming down tomorrow and we’re going to look at the surrounding tracts of land and you’ll do the title work.”
The Chase loan covered only half the purchase price, so McKissick spent the next few days scrambling to raise additional money. Unable to secure another bank loan before the option expired, he proposed that Leon Perry finance the balance himself. Perry had previously turned down a higher offer from a group of dairy farmers because they wanted to pay him over twenty years and he needed cash immediately. But when McKissick promised he would retire the mortgage within a year, Perry agreed to the deal.
By the time those details were worked out, the February 19 deadline on the option was fast approaching. McKissick had scheduled a press conference in Warren County that afternoon to announce the filing of the deed, and he and Carey left on an Eastern Air Lines flight from New York that morning. On their approach to the Raleigh-Durham a
irport, however, there was a problem: the plane’s landing gear malfunctioned. Although the control tower confirmed that the wheels were down, the light that was supposed to signal that they were locked in place was not on. As the plane circled the airfield, the copilot came into the cabin, got down on his knees, and pulled up a section of floorboard, as though looking for something. Eventually the plane turned west, and the pilot announced they were headed for Charlotte, the nearest airport that could handle an emergency landing. As they descended, McKissick and Carey could see fire trucks and ambulances lined up on the tarmac and a layer of fire-suppression foam covering the runway. But when they touched down, the wheels held firm, and the plane coasted smoothly to a stop.
Once on the ground, the two men began looking for a way to Warren County. There were no flights scheduled from Charlotte to Raleigh-Durham that afternoon and no charter planes available. A stranger, overhearing their predicament, said he was flying east in his twin-engine plane and could drop them off at the airstrip in Henderson, fifteen miles south of Warrenton. They arrived late that night, and the next morning received word from Perry that the deal was still on in spite of the missed deadline. Even so, there was a tall stack of paperwork to complete, and by 5:00 p.m. they still hadn’t finalized the transaction. The register of deeds in Warrenton kept his office open late, but at 5:25 Clayton phoned to say they would file the deed Friday instead. The deal was finally completed that night, and the next morning at ten o’clock McKissick walked into the county courthouse on Main Street and officially became the owner of the Circle P Ranch—the first Black man to hold title to the slave plantation William Duke had established almost two hundred years earlier.