by Thomas Healy
* * *
IN ADDITION TO the physical landscape of Soul City, McKissick would also need to build a social and cultural landscape. Indeed, it was the creation of a thriving and egalitarian culture that he viewed as his most important challenge. “The greatest failures of America’s cities have been in the field of human relations,” he declared in his application to HUD. Therefore, the “primary innovative aspects of Soul City will be in the social arena.” Existing cities were beset by crime, addiction, disease, poverty, pollution, and discrimination. The government had invested hundreds of millions of dollars to solve these problems, with minimal success. A new city, McKissick argued, could address such problems at the root, before they became unmanageable. He and his staff also believed this was one area where their experience as activists and organizers gave them an advantage. As they explained to officials at the Rouse Company, they might not know real estate or business, but they knew “how people live together in a community.”
An advertising flyer describes McKissick’s vision for Soul City.
To oversee this effort, McKissick established the Soul City Foundation, a nonprofit corporation funded by government grants and private donations. Headed by Eva Clayton, the foundation was responsible for planning all aspects of social life in the new community. But its most pressing concerns were health care and education. Although Warren County had several white doctors, the nearest Black physician was one county away and in heavy demand, seeing as many as seventy-five patients a day. Emergency care was also limited. Because of high costs, the fire department had discontinued ambulance service in 1968. County officials had scraped together enough money to buy a station wagon that was operated by sheriff’s deputies during the day and volunteer firemen at night. But many of the drivers didn’t have medical training, and if the vehicle was in use on one side of the county it wasn’t much help for an emergency on the other side.
As for education, the Warren County schools, like many rural systems, were underfunded and underperforming, with declining attendance rates and low test scores. They were also segregated. For a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, the school board had made no effort to integrate the schools. Black parents represented by T. T. Clayton eventually filed suit in 1963, and a federal judge ordered the county to submit a plan consistent with Brown. But after several years of stonewalling and halfhearted efforts on the part of school officials, only 2 percent of Black students were attending previously white schools, and no white students were attending Black schools. When the judge again ordered officials to adopt a new attendance plan, they persuaded the state legislature to create a separate school district for the town of Warrenton, where most students were white. The judge saw that move for what it was—a blatant attempt to evade Brown by splitting one multiracial district into two single-race districts—and declared it unconstitutional. But in 1969, school officials were still fighting integration, and it was unclear when, if ever, they would concede defeat.
McKissick knew that Soul City would need good schools to attract residents and industry. For that reason, he decided the city would eventually establish its own integrated school system, separate from Warren County’s. But until there were enough students to support such a system, he would have to rely on the county schools. That created a dilemma. If Warren County was going to absorb the additional students Soul City attracted, it would need more classrooms. Yet it made little sense for the county to build new facilities if Soul City was one day going to construct its own. So the two sides reached an agreement: McKissick would help Warren County secure funding for a new school that would serve both populations until Soul City established its own system.
Finally, the city would need an organizational structure to govern itself. There were several options available, and the UNC Institute of Government drafted a two-hundred-page report analyzing each. The most obvious choice was to incorporate Soul City as a municipality, with the full range of powers that entailed—the power to tax, invoke eminent domain, share in federal and state revenues, and annex adjacent communities. But incorporating Soul City, especially at an early stage, would limit McKissick’s flexibility, since it would put him under the control of whatever body was elected to govern the city. It was also unclear whether Soul City could qualify for incorporation: state law required a municipality to have at least five hundred residents, a benchmark Soul City wouldn’t meet for several years. Alternatively, Soul City could be established as a privately owned town governed by a homeowners’ association. This would give McKissick greater control, since as the association’s creator he could appoint its board of directors. Both Columbia and Reston had adopted this approach, and there was a long history of privately owned towns in the United States. The problem was that private towns lacked many of the powers of incorporated cities. Although they could charge fees to pay for various services, they lacked the ability to share in various types of state revenue, such as sales and liquor taxes.
As a middle ground, the Institute of Government suggested a third possibility. Soul City could establish a special district—known as a sanitary district—that would oversee a range of services related to water and waste. Such a district offered many of the advantages of incorporation without sacrificing control. It could also be accomplished without meeting any population thresholds: McKissick would simply have to apply to the Warren County Board of Commissioners and the state board of health. So that’s what McKissick did. He submitted a petition to create the Soul City Sanitary District, a taxpayer-funded agency that would provide water, sewerage, fire protection, and trash disposal for the town’s residents. When the county and state approved that petition, the sanitary district would become the governing body of the new community.
* * *
DESIGNING SOUL CITY on paper was the easy part. The real challenge would be translating that design into reality, especially as costs increased and money became tight. Innovation is expensive, and the risk was that in an effort to build Soul City economically, many of its most creative elements would have to be sacrificed. Other developers warned McKissick about this. Writing to McKissick in the summer of 1969, Reston founder Robert Simon offered high praise for McKissick’s proposal, which “greatly impressed” him. But he also offered a warning: “I have the impression that perhaps the compromises from the ideal that would be necessary to achieve economic viability have not been sufficiently taken into consideration.”
Then, of course, once all the pieces were in place—or, more accurately, as they were being put into place—McKissick would have to attract residents to live in Soul City. And the key to attracting residents was to provide desirable, well-paying jobs, which meant he would also have to attract industry. As he put it in his application to HUD, “The entire project hinges on one single factor: the development of a job base of a sufficient size in Warren County to generate the demand for housing and services which will make the city possible.” Columbia had struggled in its early years for lack of jobs. But then General Electric agreed to build a plant employing twelve thousand people, after James Rouse borrowed $19 million to supply it with the land. McKissick couldn’t offer that kind of incentive, so the Department of Commerce identified a number of industries that might be interested in Soul City’s cheap labor and proximity to Kerr Lake: textile companies, paper mills, printing plants, and beverage processors. McKissick had already talked with a handful of Fortune 500 companies, lunching with C. W. “Tex” Cook, the chairman of General Foods, and meeting with executives from General Motors. He had also made a pitch to Hanes, a clothing manufacturer owned by a Winston-Salem family with a progressive record on racial issues.
But just as residents would not move to Soul City unless there were jobs, companies would not locate in Soul City unless there were skilled workers to run their factories and safe, attractive neighborhoods for their managers to live in. As the Harvard case study noted, “In most situations, a business decides to locate in a particular area only after analyzing a series of existing
economic and social conditions.” In the case of Soul City, there was nothing to analyze except a plot of empty land, a stack of planning maps, and a proposal. This meant that any company investing in Soul City would need faith—faith in HUD, faith in Warren County, and, most importantly, faith in McKissick. “To locate in Soul City,” the Harvard study concluded, business had “to be convinced that McKissick’s dream for a new city would ultimately become an economic reality.”
It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem, and it forced McKissick to pursue a strategy of concurrent development, building Soul City at the same time as he recruited residents and industry. “It’s not a which comes first thing,” McKissick explained to officials at the Rouse Company. “They both come first. They both come together, right now.”
The stakes couldn’t have been higher. If McKissick’s gamble succeeded, it would pave the way for an entirely new type of development, making possible the creation of new cities across the country. If the gamble failed, McKissick’s dream would die with it.
• 9 •
“The Salad Pickers”
During the first year of planning, Soul City remained uninhabited except for a few dozen cattle Leon Perry had left behind and a caretaker who had been hired to watch over the place. McKissick visited just twice: in March, to attend a planning conference, and again in September, when he and Carey spent a week on-site. It was not until this latter trip that he was able to fully explore the property he now owned. Walking the fields and red clay roads, he was struck again by the beauty of the land—its rolling hills, winding creeks, and verdant woods—and marveled at his good fortune. “It is land with a tremendous potential,” he wrote to Perry upon returning to New York.
As 1969 came to a close, however, McKissick decided it was time to establish a physical presence at Soul City. He purchased five trailers from a dealer in Henderson—four for residential use, one for an office—and began moving members of his staff to the Circle P Ranch. The first to arrive was his former brother-in-law Duncan McNeill, who was divorced from McKissick’s youngest sister, Jean. An electrical contractor by training, McNeill had given up his job in Durham to help McKissick build his city. Working with T. T. Clayton, he hauled the trailers to a site just a stone’s throw from the old manor house and connected them to water and electricity. Then, in early January, he and his daughter Beverly, a student at Duke University, moved into one trailer, while Gordon Carey, his wife, Betye, and their four-year-old daughter, Kristina Lee, occupied another. Within a few weeks, they were joined by Jane Groom, the young secretary from McKissick Enterprises, who brought along her own large and boisterous family.
For Groom, the move to Soul City was a leap of faith and an act of desperation. Born and raised in Mount Vernon, a working-class suburb of New York City, she had been south just twice before, as a small child, to visit her grandparents. Like millions of other Black southerners, Groom’s own parents had migrated north during the Great Depression in search of opportunity. They found it, or at least a glimmer of it, in Mount Vernon. Her mother worked as a maid for rich families in nearby Scarsdale, while her father taught himself radio repair. Between their two modest salaries they managed to get by for a while, renting a three-story house in the colored section of Mount Vernon and raising five children. Jane was the youngest, and the family home—with its large sun porch, French doors, and wrought-iron fence adorned with a B (for Ball, her maiden name)—made a powerful impression on her. She felt contented and safe there, with a backyard to play in, plenty of friends to play with, and the comforting smell of the ham hocks and navy beans her mother cooked mingling with the bleach she used to clean house. So when her family fell behind on rent and was forced to move into a dreary building nearby, she vowed she would never let the same thing happen to her.
But finding a decent home in Mount Vernon was not easy, and when Jane married her teenage sweetheart, Jimmy Groom, the couple rented a two-bedroom apartment in Levister Towers, one of the many high-rise projects built during the era of urban renewal. Relatively new and clean when the Grooms arrived, Levister Towers quickly deteriorated, graffiti spreading across its walls, roaches and rats infesting its apartments, and the stench of urine filling its hallways. Like her mother, Groom gave birth to five children, and she and Jimmy struggled to make ends meet. He held a series of low-paying jobs (baker, school security guard), while she found temporary work as a secretary. It was a difficult life, and had they continued on the same path, they likely would have spent the rest of it in Levister Towers or some other vertical slum—pleading with management to make improvements, fearing for their children’s safety, and wondering why they could never get ahead. But shortly after the birth of her youngest child, Groom glimpsed a way out. Reading the Daily Argus, Mount Vernon’s morning newspaper, she came across an ad for a secretarial opening at McKissick Enterprises. A job in Harlem—working for a prominent civil rights figure—was just the kind of break she needed. Arranging child care with her mother, she applied for the job in the fall of 1968 and, after a typing test and an interview with McKissick himself, was offered the position.
Working for McKissick Enterprises was a revelation. Though long interested in the civil rights movement, Groom had been mainly a spectator, too busy raising children and helping support her family to take an active part. In her new job, she found herself at the center of the drama. She met famous leaders such as James Farmer and Stokely Carmichael. She typed up reports on the role of Black capitalism. And she learned about McKissick’s plans for a new city in rural North Carolina. Like many people, Groom wasn’t sure what to think of Soul City at first. The idea of a Black man building a new city on a former slave plantation seemed fanciful, like something out of science fiction. But as she became increasingly involved in the project, organizing conferences and working on grant proposals, she began to believe in its potential. So when McKissick asked for staff members willing to work on site, Groom eagerly volunteered. Her plan was to stay a few weeks, long enough to set up the office and train someone to run it. But in December 1969, shortly before she was scheduled to leave, her mother died suddenly. It was a shattering loss for Groom, who shared everything with her mother—her concern for her children, her hatred of Levister Towers, and her troubles with Jimmy, who seemed incapable of holding a job or remaining faithful. Desperate to escape her grief and looking for a way to salvage her marriage and her kids’ future, she decided to take her family with her to Soul City, and to stay indefinitely.
They left on a blustery winter day in January 1970, seven of them and their belongings crammed into a Dodge Dart—the four oldest kids in the backseat, Jimmy behind the wheel, and Groom in the passenger seat with her two-year-old daughter, Amy, on her lap. The drive down was “a feat of sheer determination,” Groom later recounted in her memoir, The Salad Pickers. Like the migrants who had traveled in the opposite direction for decades, Groom packed fried chicken for the ride, along with biscuits, sandwiches, and soda. For the first few hours she distracted the kids with books and games, and when they tired of those she told them to look for the Mason-Dixon Line (knowing full well there was nothing to see). By the time they arrived in Warren County, ten hours later, it was past midnight, and the children were asleep, heads resting on each other’s shoulders. Jimmy pulled the car into the parking lot of a post office on Route 1, just across from the railroad tracks. He and Groom could see a dirt road disappearing into the woods and the outline of several small buildings nearby, but there were no people, no cars, and only a single streetlight standing guard. They waited in silence, listening and looking. When the clock turned two and there was still no sign of life, they decided to sleep in the car. Jimmy leaned back and dozed off at once, while Groom stared out the window, trying not to wake the child in her lap, until finally she fell asleep, too.
Almost as soon as she did, the sun nudged her awake, and what had been merely shapes and suggestions in the darkness came into focus. Next to the post office was an old brick service station. Across
the street stood a red clapboard antiques store, and down the road lurked a small cinder-block building. Other than that, she could see only trees and fields, and as she looked around at so much nothingness she was gripped by panic. “Jimmy, take me home,” she wanted to scream. But the children were beginning to stir, and as they, too, took in the desolate scene she decided to act. Spotting a truck coming toward them, she elbowed Jimmy, who flagged it down and told the driver they were looking for Soul City. “Well, let me see,” the man replied in a deep drawl. “There are some development folks living on the old Satterwhite Plantation, but there sure ain’t no city there yet.” That was all Jimmy needed to hear. He asked for directions, and the driver motioned toward the railroad tracks, instructing him to follow the dirt road.
Jimmy did as the man said, steering the car across the tracks, then following the red-clay path as it twisted past pine groves and cornfields. And when, a mile down the road, they saw a “Welcome to Soul City” sign nailed to a tree at the edge of a pasture, Groom wondered again what she was doing here. But she kept her composure for the children’s sake, and Jimmy pointed to a red barn. A few hundred feet past the barn, they came upon the old manor house, and behind the house, adjacent to a cornfield, they found the only evidence of a city under construction—the five single-wide trailers.
The first person to greet them was Gordon Carey. He came bounding out of his trailer with a big, welcoming smile. “Wow, Jane. This is your family,” he said, as though in disbelief that she had really moved her husband and five kids to a farm in the middle of nowhere. But behind his astonishment, Groom sensed a newfound respect, and as she looked around again at the “endless green and brown fields,” as she breathed in the “pure, sweet air” and listened to the “beautiful quiet,” her initial despair turned to relief, then excitement. She thanked God for her family’s safe arrival and decided she would stay and make a life in Soul City after all.