Soul City

by Thomas Healy

  * * *

  WHICH IS WHAT Groom and her family did. Moving into the smallest of the five trailers, they did their best to turn it into a home, furnishing it with a secondhand sofa from the Salvation Army and decorating it with books and pictures from Mount Vernon. The three older girls—Lianndra (age eleven), Sandra (nine), and Julia (seven)—shared a small room with bunk beds, while Jim-Jim, age four and the only boy, occupied another. Amy slept in a crib in the living area, with Groom and Jimmy in the room next door. The trailer was smaller than their apartment in Levister Towers, but it was new, there were no roaches, and it had an 1,800-acre backyard, which the children began to explore as soon as the car was unpacked.

  The trailers where the Grooms and other early settlers lived.

  But the three families—and others that soon joined them—had come to build a city, not just make a life. And over the next few months they began the most basic aspects of the job, cleaning out the red barn for use as an office and converting the old manor house into a preschool and community center. Both buildings were a wreck. In the barn, they found rusty pitchforks, feed buckets, broken pen gates, dried-up tobacco leaves, and a menagerie of insects, while the manor house had been taken over by roosting chickens. With a scarf tied around her head, Groom grabbed a mop and broom and began, in her words, “to sweep away the dust of past generations.”

  Life in Soul City was not glamorous. As Carey recalled, “The first year I was here we spent half of our time unfreezing pipes, pulling cars out of the mud, just getting the physical systems going.” Like the Grooms, Carey and his wife had lived most of their adult lives in urban centers, first in Los Angeles, then in New York and Washington, DC. Now these city folks were thrust into rural North Carolina and, like the migrants traveling in the opposite direction, they had much to learn. A few weeks after arriving, the Grooms woke up one snowy morning to discover the taps were dry. Certain she had paid the water bill, Groom asked Jimmy to go outside and take a look. Crawling under the trailer, he discovered that the pipes had frozen. While he borrowed a blowtorch from the neighbors, Groom made a mental note to leave the faucets dripping on cold winter nights.

  At times, the settlers’ lack of experience was comical. When a herd of cattle broke through the fence and blocked the road, Carey and McKissick hopped into their cars and tried to round them up, like a pair of suburban cowboys. And when spring arrived and the settlers decided to plant a garden, they had to ask local farmers for help. Gathering on a warm Saturday morning with hoes, shovels, and rakes, they learned how to till the soil in straight rows, how much room to leave between crops, and how to bury the seeds gently under the earth so the rain wouldn’t wash them away. It was all very serious until Groom, losing her balance with a hoe, fell backward onto the ground, spilling a handful of seeds and laughing uncontrollably. Still, they managed a successful harvest of cabbage, peas, collards, turnip greens, and tomatoes. The only crop that didn’t survive were the potatoes. As Groom discovered later, she had planted the spuds upside down.

  But their inexperience could also be dangerous. In late winter, not long after the first families arrived, Carey was burning trash in a field behind the manor house when the fire spread out of his control. As the wind blew the flames across the fields, he and Duncan McNeill tried frantically to contain them. But the two men were no match for the blaze, which jumped the property line in one direction and raced toward the trailers in the other. Fortunately, someone called for help, and both the volunteer fire department and the forestry service soon arrived. While the firemen doused the flames, the forest rangers felled a row of trees to create a firebreak. It was a terrifying incident, but it had one unexpected benefit: Carey and McNeill met dozens of their new neighbors.

  Nature presented hazards of its own. Groom learned this one day when she was cooking in her kitchen with the door open and noticed something gray and bushy slip into the trailer. Rabbits and cats were abundant at the Circle P Ranch, but this animal was too large to be either. And its eyes, round and yellow, looked wild. Realizing she was face to face with a bobcat, Groom ran screaming out the door, an apron tied around her waist, a spoon still in her hand. She kept running until she reached the manor house. Only then did she turn around to watch as the bobcat fled across the fields.

  It wasn’t just the environment that was unfamiliar; it was the culture, too. In Mount Vernon, the Groom children had attended racially diverse schools where Blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians mixed easily. In Warren County, the school system was still reeling from a bitter fight over integration. Officials delayed the opening of the schools in the fall of 1970 and then, once classes began, canceled the free lunch program, which mainly served Black students. They also denied admission to Black children living outside the county, even though such children had been welcomed when the schools were segregated. And they rejected a series of demands by Black students—for Black history courses, Black administrators, and the right to organize a youth chapter of the NAACP. When Black students marched to the county school building to complain, the Board of Education responded by closing the schools for more than a week. Then, once classes resumed, Black students refused to return until their demands were met. They also organized a protest at John Graham High School, during which a curtain in the auditorium caught fire. No students were arrested at the scene, but that night police swore out fifty-eight warrants, which they served the next day. Ultimately, eighteen Black students were tried, convicted, and given suspended jail sentences. By the time they returned to school several weeks later, the entire community was on edge.

  Things were even worse twenty miles down the road, in the small town of Oxford. In the spring of 1970, a white store owner and his two sons killed a Black man who allegedly made a flirtatious remark to the owner’s daughter-in-law. The killing took place on a busy street, in the middle of a Black neighborhood, in front of several witnesses. And it was brutal. The white men chased their victim down the street, beat him viciously, and then, while he lay on the ground pleading for mercy, shot him in the head. When police failed to arrest the perpetrators for more than thirty-six hours, hundreds of Black residents protested in downtown Oxford, throwing bricks and bottles through storefront windows and setting several buildings on fire. Then, when the white men were acquitted because prosecutors couldn’t prove who had pulled the trigger—though it was beyond dispute that one of them had—the Black community launched a crippling boycott of white businesses that turned Main Street into a ghost town.

  No one in Soul City encountered any violence or overt harassment. As the staff noted in a memo to HUD, “There have been no hostile reactions, no vandalism, no crank calls, or letters.” But there were small signs that not everyone welcomed them. On a trip to the grocery store in Norlina, a crossroads community a few miles away, Groom was so preoccupied with her children and shopping list that she left her wallet on the counter. Discovering her mistake as she drove home, she turned the car around and went back to the store. But when she asked the clerk whether he had seen the wallet, he shrugged and played dumb, as though he had no idea what she was talking about.

  Evelyn McKissick had an equally infuriating experience at the Mammoth Mart in Henderson. Writing a check for $8.70, she was told by the clerk that the store didn’t accept out-of-state checks. Evelyn pointed out that she had written checks at the store in the past and asked to see the manager, who repeated the clerk’s message. But when Evelyn presented a check from Mechanics and Farmers Bank in Durham, the manager changed his story, saying that he would only accept checks from banks in Henderson. And when Evelyn asked him to call the Peoples Bank and Trust in Henderson, where she had just opened an account, he refused. Instead, growing angry and flustered, he told her he didn’t want her business. What about the thousands of new residents who would soon be moving to Soul City, Evelyn asked. Didn’t he want their business? No, the manager announced. He didn’t care if anyone from Soul City ever shopped at his store.

  Despite the difficulties,
life in Soul City was filled with hope and joy. Neither the Groom children nor Kristina Carey had ever lived in the country before, and they were awestruck by the expanse of nature. They spent long days outside, playing hide-and-seek, making mud pies, climbing trees, chasing rabbits, and wading through creeks. On Easter, they hunted for eggs in the tall grass behind the trailers. And during the summer, they joined dozens of other kids from Warren County who packed into the manor house for a camp run by the Quakers.

  The adults had joys of their own. On warm summer nights, they gathered on the concrete steps of their trailers to drink beer and tell stories. And on weekend afternoons, they took turns playing cowboy behind the manor house. In addition to the cattle, Leon Perry had left behind several horses and a tack room equipped with saddles, reins, and bridles. Gordon Carey was especially fond of riding. Prior to living in Soul City, he had been on a horse only once, years before, in Mexico. But there was a Black dentist in Warrenton who taught him everything he needed to know: how to fasten a saddle, how to hold the reins, how to feed and clean the animals. Carey was not a natural horseman. He could never get used to the horses’ size, and he sometimes had difficulty controlling his mount. But he loved it nonetheless. He would often saddle up in the middle of the day to survey the land. Sitting high in the saddle and roaming the fields, he liked to pretend he was a rancher taking time each day to inspect the fences, look for strays, and explore pockets of the property too overgrown to reach by foot.

  * * *

  MCKISSICK DID NOT move to Soul City with the other members of his staff. He stayed in Harlem, managing McKissick Enterprises, negotiating with HUD, and trying to secure industrial commitments. But he drove down every few weekends with Evelyn and one or more of their four children. Once there, he visibly relaxed, trading in his dress shoes for boots and donning a cowboy hat to protect himself from the sun. The change was evident even to strangers. “North Carolina seemed to bring out the best in McKissick,” the author of the Harvard case study wrote. “Back home, freed from the stifling air of the urban north, he seemed to come to life. As he walked around the land that would be Soul City, he was simultaneously a highly competent businessman and a common man, talking to the case writer about equity financing and to the local farmer about hay and chickens.”

  Still, McKissick had much on his mind. In spite of Sam Jackson’s optimism the previous fall, HUD hadn’t yet approved his application for a planning grant, and McKissick wasn’t sure what was taking so long.

  One reason for the delay was that HUD had been inundated with applications. By the spring of 1970, nearly thirty developers had applied for funding under the New Communities Act. The proposals ran the gamut, from a retirement community nine miles west of Los Angeles called Beautiful City, to a lakefront development in Utah named Stansbury Park, to an alcohol rehabilitation center for a Navajo tribe in New Mexico. HUD rejected the vast majority of proposals, usually because they weren’t financially viable, but sometimes because of environmental concerns or lack of follow-through by the developers. It turned down Hamilton, a proposed town in California, because of its location along the San Andreas Fault, and Fountain Hills, a planned community near Phoenix, because the developer lacked a commitment to low-income housing. It rejected James Rouse and Robert Simon, both of whom applied for funding, on the grounds that the law was designed to support new communities, not existing ones.

  McKissick in front of the “big house” in the summer of 1970.

  When it came to Soul City, HUD continued to question the project’s economic feasibility, fearful that McKissick would be unable to create the jobs needed to attract residents, sell land, and cover the costs of development. To address this concern, McKissick had hired Hammer, Greene, Siler, a Washington, DC, consulting firm, to prepare an economic analysis. It was a smart choice. In addition to being highly regarded in planning circles, Hammer, Greene, Siler was committed to social justice. The firm’s founder, Philip G. Hammer, was an urban planner and civil rights activist who had worked for Robert M. La Follette, the progressive Wisconsin senator, before moving to Atlanta in 1946. There, he headed the Metropolitan Planning Commission, which oversaw the city’s remarkable midcentury growth. Hammer later started his own firm, working with cities such as Norfolk, Charlotte, and St. Louis. He served as president of the American Society of Planning Officials in the 1960s and was appointed chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission by Lyndon Johnson.

  Hammer’s report on Soul City emphasized the state’s industrial growth and vibrant labor market. Over the next two decades, it noted, North Carolina was expected to add 624,000 manufacturing jobs, most of them in the Piedmont, where Warren County was located. If Soul City captured even a sliver of that growth, it would easily meet its target of 9,000 manufacturing jobs, which would generate an equivalent number of service jobs. And that was without taking into account the effect a newly built city might have on industrial recruiting. As for labor, the exodus of thousands of young people from Warren County over the past decade showed that the supply of workers exceeded demand. Thus, if Soul City attracted industry, it would have no problem finding workers, even without an influx of new residents. None of this ensured that Soul City would succeed, the report acknowledged. Many factors would play a role, including the level of financing McKissick received and the effectiveness of his team, which Hammer found “no reason to question.” But the existence of jobs and workers was an “absolutely essential pre-condition to the undertaking, and the evidence would appear conclusive that this pre-condition will be met.”

  McKissick submitted Hammer’s report in January 1970, hopeful it would allay doubts about the project’s viability. But one month later, HUD still hadn’t approved the planning grant, and without the grant—or some other source of funding—McKissick lacked the resources to move forward. He had applied for another loan from Chase, but executives there wanted assurance that HUD would ultimately approve the application. They traveled to Washington shortly after the New Year to meet with Jackson. If he gave them that assurance, they explained, they were willing to loan McKissick $2.5 million to stay afloat. Jackson was noncommittal, pointing out that Soul City hadn’t yet filed the application fee of $5,000. McKissick promptly mailed in a check for that amount, assuming that would resolve the issue. But HUD still refused to make any promises, and the Chase executives began to suspect it wasn’t serious about Soul City. Meanwhile, McKissick’s financial position was precarious. He had been unable to pay anyone on his staff, including himself, for more than a month. If he didn’t get an infusion of cash soon, he would be forced to shut the project down.

  The situation called for another lobbying campaign, and McKissick soon launched one. On February 6, he wrote to William Nicoson, director of HUD’s New Communities Administration, inquiring about the cause of the delay. Ten days later, he wrote to Nixon, explaining his predicament and asking for help. The next day, he fired off a letter to George Romney, the HUD secretary, making a similar request. The day after that, he wrote Nicoson again, pressing for an answer to his earlier letter.

  But he reserved his most urgent plea for Jackson. In a letter sent by registered mail, McKissick implored his old friend to tell Chase what it wanted to hear. “The critical period in our life is now,” he wrote. “If the Government says we can get a guarantee, our problems are solved.” Without a guarantee, Soul City would be dead in the water, unable to secure loans from banks, recruit industry, or attract investors. What was the point of the New Communities Act, McKissick asked, if HUD refused to make the very guarantees the law authorized? “No one is trying to get rich at the Government’s expense,” he assured Jackson. He and Chase were simply trying to fulfill Congress’s goal of creating new, socially diverse towns. They had already invested more than half a million dollars as proof of their commitment. Now it was HUD’s turn to reciprocate.

  “Sam, you are a committed man; this I know,” McKissick concluded. “These bankers who do not know want some evidence that you are
going to move things—and move things right away.”

  * * *

  WHILE MCKISSICK WAITED for an answer from Jackson, he reached out to state officials, hoping they might lobby HUD on his behalf. In March, he arranged a meeting with North Carolina governor Bob Scott. He had met with Scott the year before, shortly after announcing his plans for Soul City. But that had been an informational session, designed to answer any questions the governor might have. Now he was seeking Scott’s support, and it was not an easy sell.

  Elected in 1968, Scott was a descendant of the state’s leading political family. His grandfather and uncle had both served in the North Carolina legislature, and his father, W. Kerr Scott, had been governor from 1954 to 1958. Longtime Democrats, the Scotts were no liberals. And their record on race was mixed. Kerr Scott had styled himself a moderate while governor, appointing the integrationist Frank Porter Graham to a vacant seat in the US Senate. But later, serving in the Senate himself, he had signed the Southern Manifesto opposing Brown v. Board of Education. His son, meanwhile, had distanced himself from the civil rights movement during his own campaign for governor. He had also angered Black residents with his response to student demonstrations at North Carolina A&T in the spring of 1969. After protesters exchanged gunfire with local police, Scott declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew, and sent in five hundred National Guardsmen to sweep the campus for weapons—a move that resulted in the detention of more than two hundred students, the destruction of thousands of dollars’ worth of personal property, and the discovery of only two functioning guns. Appraising the government’s response, an advisory committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights declared the Guard’s actions reckless and disproportionate to the danger posed.