Soul City

by Thomas Healy

  Soul City was not the first town that applied for funding under the New Communities Act. By the spring of 1969, HUD had received applications from more than a dozen developers and was on the verge of approving its first loan, a $21 million guarantee for the town of Jonathan, Minnesota. Proposed by a state senator and real estate mogul named Henry T. McKnight, Jonathan would be built on eight thousand acres of rolling fields and woodlands thirty minutes from downtown Minneapolis. If all went according to plan, it would have fifty thousand residents and fifteen thousand homes within twenty years.

  But although not the first applicant, Soul City posed special challenges for HUD. For one thing, unlike most proposals, Soul City was designed to be a freestanding town, not a bedroom community. In that respect, it was more faithful to the intent of the law’s sponsors, who wanted to encourage the building of completely new cities, not mere satellites. But Soul City’s location in a rural area meant that McKissick would have to build the city’s entire infrastructure from scratch. He would also have to create an economic base to provide jobs for the city’s residents. Compounding these problems was the fact that McKissick, unlike many applicants, had no experience with large-scale real estate projects. Nor did he have access to the kind of money HUD ordinarily required developers to contribute as a condition of the loan guarantee. Thus, just like the bankers at Chase, officials in the New Communities Administration were initially skeptical of McKissick’s proposal.

  Then there was the issue of race. Soul City was the only new town proposed by a Black developer, and HUD staffers were acutely aware that the media had portrayed it as a separatist venture. They were also aware of the legal risks of supporting a racially identifiable city. Just four months before Congress passed the New Communities Act, it had approved the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed racial discrimination in housing. If HUD funded Soul City, and it became an exclusively, or even predominantly, Black community, the agency might violate the very law it was supposed to enforce. And if Soul City did not violate the Fair Housing Act, HUD might face pressure to fund exclusively or predominantly white developments. HUD had already received an application from a white developer near Memphis that raised precisely this concern. The agency therefore made clear it would only support Soul City if it were truly integrated. HUD was so concerned about the issue that it considered recruiting a white developer to join the project. In a memo never shared with McKissick, one HUD staffer argued that the addition of a white developer would give the city a more integrated, biracial feel.

  HUD was also sensitive to the political implications of Soul City. Ordinarily, a member of Congress would jump at the chance to secure federal money for his state. But Soul City was no ordinary project, and instead of jumping on board, North Carolina’s congressional delegation was running in the opposite direction. Representative L. H. Fountain, whose district included Warren County, wrote HUD secretary George Romney in June 1969 that he had received numerous letters opposing Soul City and had doubts about the project himself. Sam Ervin, the state’s senior senator, was more blunt, urging Romney to reject McKissick’s proposal because it was inappropriate to use taxpayer dollars to fund a private real estate development. “Manifestly, the taxpayers of the United States ought not to be called upon to finance directly or indirectly any such plans,” Ervin wrote, ignoring the federal government’s long history of supporting private real estate developments, many of them deliberately and exclusively white.

  For all the opposition, however, McKissick had a powerful ally within HUD: his friend Sam Jackson, now the assistant secretary overseeing the New Communities Administration. Jackson and McKissick had known each other for years. Both were attorneys who had been active in the civil rights movement (Jackson’s firm in Topeka, Kansas, had represented the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education), and both were founding members of the National Conference of Black Lawyers. The two men were close enough that Jackson, concerned about perceptions of favoritism, assigned a young planner on his staff to communicate with the New Communities Administration about McKissick’s application. Some HUD staffers also recognized the potential of Soul City. In an initial review of McKissick’s application, one staff member argued that it presented a unique opportunity. “This project cannot be treated as an ordinary case,” the staffer wrote. “It has implications of national and international importance. We must use it creatively.” Another HUD official acknowledged that the racial dimensions of the project cut both ways. “It’s a problem,” the official told a reporter for the Washington Evening Star. “On the one hand, we don’t want to be in the position of encouraging a segregated community, and this will be, in effect, a de facto segregated town. On the other hand, here is a region in North Carolina that needs better housing, better community facilities, and this is something we should be encouraging.”

  The conflicting views within HUD—and the political pressure from outside—meant that Soul City’s application was scrutinized more closely than others. After a preliminary review raised questions about McKissick’s ability to attract industry, HUD sent the application back with a request for more information, including a cash flow analysis, an economic feasibility study, and demographic projections. It also suggested that McKissick apply for a planning grant under the New Communities Act to complete the studies and analyses HUD needed for a final decision.

  Frustrated by this delay, McKissick launched the first of many lobbying campaigns, writing to Bob Brown at the White House and to Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had been a vocal proponent of new towns on the campaign trail. In late July, McKissick sent Agnew a copy of the Soul City application, along with a note emphasizing the project’s unique nature. “This is not the traditional dormitory town which is dependent upon another city for its existence,” he wrote. “It is designed to bring employment, housing, and new life to a rural, depressed area.” Receiving only a polite response from one of Agnew’s aides, McKissick wrote again a few weeks later, this time copying Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a White House adviser who had authored a notorious 1965 report placing the blame for Black poverty on the disintegration of “the Negro Family.” Railing against bureaucratic procedure, McKissick complained about HUD’s insistence that he obtain commitments from industry before receiving a loan guarantee. “Were we able to secure sufficient commitments from industry, in advance, it is questionable whether we would even require federal guarantee of the land development costs,” he pointed out. What Soul City needed, McKissick continued, was a provisional commitment that would give industry the assurance it was looking for. “As it stands today, the potential sources of financing and the industrial sources of jobs all inquire as to whether the federal government will stand behind our program. Our answer now can only be, ‘We don’t know.’”

  Having made the case in writing, McKissick and Carey traveled to Washington in September to meet with officials at HUD, OEO, the Commerce Department, and the Agriculture Department. A few weeks later, McKissick returned to the capital, this time with Jack Parker, the chair of City and Regional Planning at UNC. He also met with executives at Wachovia Bank, in Winston-Salem, who said they were willing to join a consortium of banks supporting Soul City. And he wrote again to Bob Brown, suggesting that the Nixon administration could repair its relationship with Black voters by giving the green light to Soul City.

  The lobbying campaign appeared to work. Just as McKissick was beginning to lose hope, he received good news from Sam Jackson. Within a short period of time—perhaps by the beginning of the new year—HUD would approve the planning grant, and Soul City would be on its way. The change of attitude was striking enough that Carey remarked on it in a letter to a faculty member at UNC. “We had excellent meetings” in Washington, he wrote. “All of the governmental agencies suddenly seem to be warming up and ready to move ahead.”

  • 8 •

  A Fresh Start

  Most cities take shape gradually, organically. A trading post is established near a river or a crossroads, and if the
location is propitious more traders arrive, turning the settlement into a town. Houses are built, roads are laid, a church is erected, a school opens, a government is formed. Seeking to attract more people, the government collects taxes to make improvements. It paves the roads, expands the school, builds a park, a library, a museum, and a hospital. It licenses utilities to provide water, sewerage, and electricity. It establishes a police department to keep the town safe, a sanitation department to keep it clean, and a fire department to keep it intact. As the town grows into a city, new amenities and services are added: theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, shopping centers, golf courses, swimming pools. And slowly, over the course of decades or even centuries, what began as a simple collection of pioneers and fortune seekers evolves into a complex and highly organized society.

  In the case of Soul City, all this would have to happen at once, in a tightly compressed period of time. McKissick wouldn’t have the luxury of building his city slowly and patiently, because the only way to finance such a project was to sell land, and the only way to sell land was to create a self-sufficient community that could attract residents and businesses. Nor could McKissick rely on a nearby city to provide services while he built his town. A development like Reston or Park Forest could postpone nonessential projects, such as museums, malls, theaters, and nightclubs, since residents could make the short drive to Washington, DC, or Chicago for those amenities. Soul City would have to provide everything residents wanted and needed by itself.

  McKissick and his staff had always known, in a vague sort of way, how difficult this would be. But they had been so busy drafting the proposal, scouting for land, and negotiating the option that they hadn’t fully considered the challenges that lay ahead when McKissick made his announcement in January 1969. The magnitude of the task didn’t become clear until a week later, when they met with the faculty of the UNC Department of City and Regional Planning, a group of professionals who understood just how much effort and foresight was required to build a thriving community.

  Even before announcing his plans, McKissick had reached out to Jack Parker, the department’s longtime chair. Sixty years old, with a full head of wavy white hair, Parker was a distinguished figure in the academic planning world. A graduate of MIT, he had come to Chapel Hill in 1945 to establish the university’s first planning department. Unlike most such departments, the program Parker created was grounded not in engineering and architecture but in the social sciences—in economics, law, public health, and environmental studies. Parker viewed planning as a humanistic endeavor, a means of creating sustainable, democratic communities that meet the economic and social needs of all people. Within his own realm, however, he was more of an autocrat than a democrat. Although he was warm and sociable, hosting lively parties at his home where he played piano and served bourbon “punch” (bourbon poured over ice in a crystal bowl), he ran the department like a fiefdom. When McKissick sent word through an intermediary that he was planning a new city and needed the department’s help, Parker didn’t waste time consulting his faculty. Instead, he dispatched a telegram to McKissick’s office in New York declaring his interest in the project and requesting a meeting to learn more.

  The meeting took place the Friday after McKissick’s announcement, in the faculty lounge of Morehead Planetarium, an imposing redbrick building on the Chapel Hill campus. McKissick was accompanied by a handful of advisers—Carey, Clayton, two senior managers, and his newly hired architect, Conrad Johnson Jr.—while Parker brought along a dozen faculty members. Dressed in a three-piece suit, McKissick stood at the head of a long conference table strewn with ashtrays and spoke eloquently about the philosophy behind Soul City. But the planners wanted to talk details. They quizzed McKissick about land use, transportation, housing, utilities, recreation, and health care. And as they peppered him with one question after another, he and his staff began to realize what an enormous task they had undertaken. They also realized they could not accomplish that task while pursuing all the other ventures launched by McKissick Enterprises. So they put aside everything else—the publishing house, the public relations firm, the hot sauce line—and embarked on an intensive yearlong effort to plan Soul City.

  They began with a series of conferences on various aspects of city planning. In February, they held a symposium at Howard University to discuss industrial recruitment. In March, they organized a summit in Warren County to explore educational policy. And in April, they cosponsored a seminar at Columbia Business School to strategize economic development. The schedule was hectic and demanding, and it began to wear on the faculty members, who were accustomed to a more academic pace. “There is yet another Soul City planning conference in the offing at the end of this week,” a couple of professors grumbled to their colleagues that spring.

  But McKissick was energized. At Howard, he spoke passionately about the potential of Soul City to provide a source of wealth for Black residents, while in Warren County he entertained the audience of a hundred academics, government officials, and activists with his unvarnished reflections on race and intelligence. Recounting the story of a Stanford professor who claimed that Blacks possessed just one type of intelligence and were therefore fit only for manual labor, McKissick cited his own experience as a rebuttal. “I’ve been to Harvard and Yale and even to Stanford and I know black folks and white folk, and I can tell you there are smart white folks and dumb white folk, and smart niggers and dumb niggers, and if the white folks didn’t spend so much time trying to prove that niggers were dumb they’d realize that.” Then, as his audience laughed, McKissick launched into a call and response with himself, as though he were in a church instead of a reception hall, addressing a congregation instead of a conference.

  “Can Black folks do it?” he asked. “Yes!

  “Can niggers build a city? We can!

  “Will it be the best damn city in the country? It will!

  “And who’s going to build it? Niggers!

  “With as much intelligence as whites? Yes!”

  * * *

  MCKISSICK’S CONVICTION WAS infectious, leading others to believe in his dream as much as he did. “I never saw him hesitate,” recalled David Godschalk, a UNC planning professor who worked extensively on Soul City. “He projected an air of total confidence that we’re going to do this.” That confidence was deliberate. McKissick believed that with enough determination, anything could be accomplished. “Belief in one’s ability to do a thing is ‘the’ difference between success and failure,” he had written in a law school essay titled “Will v. Reason.” “For with the belief that a thing can be done, it will be done.”

  Yet even McKissick acknowledged the role of “reason” in confronting the obstacles in one’s path. And in order to make his dream a reality, he had to reason through a series of difficult questions.

  The first question was whether the Circle P Ranch could support a city. Was the soil stable and adequately drained, or would it shift under the weight of all that concrete, steel, and brick? Were there topographical features—rocky outcroppings, underground water sources, sensitive ecosystems—that would make development impracticable or unlawful? Would erosion or other environmental hazards threaten the long-term viability of the project? McKissick hadn’t considered any of these questions before buying the land and didn’t have the money to explore them now. So he turned to the Department of Agriculture for help. Although Orville Freeman had stepped down as secretary, his assistant William Seabron had stayed on, and he persuaded the Soil Conservation Service to provide McKissick with a soil survey, a contour map, a description of the watershed area, and aerial photographs. The work was time-consuming and tedious—a surveyor walked every square foot of the property, marking ponds, streams, hills, valleys, and dirt roads, while a scientist took test borings and analyzed the soil’s mineral content—and would have cost two hundred thousand dollars on the open market. Fortunately for McKissick, the government did the job for free, and the results were favorable. The conservationists co
ncluded that the land was stable and well drained, with a stream that ran year-round and no evidence of erosion or troublesome outcroppings. In short, they reported, “the property appears to present a minimum of development problems as a new town.” A planner at UNC was even more encouraging. “The land is ideal for a city,” he told the authors of the Harvard case study on Soul City. “There are just enough hills to make it attractive without making it difficult to build and live on.”

  McKissick also had to decide how big Soul City would be. He had initially projected a population of eighteen thousand within ten years, reasoning it would be unrealistic to aim larger. But it turned out that a bigger city would be easier to build. The larger the project, the more excitement it would generate, which would attract more interest from builders and industry. To aim big, in other words, was to project confidence, which was critical for a speculative development like this. So as planning moved forward, the population projections grew, first to forty-four thousand residents by 1990, then to fifty thousand people and twenty-four thousand jobs by the turn of the century. As Carey explained to reporters, “The very boldness of this project will generate far greater support from society than if it was less ambitious.” Of course, there were risks to this approach. The larger the ambition, the greater the expectations. And if those expectations weren’t met—or weren’t met quickly enough—the project would be labeled a failure, which would scare away the very investors and residents it needed to succeed.