by Thomas Healy
The preparation came in handy the next day, when the team appeared before a half dozen HUD staffers. McKissick spoke for roughly an hour, clicking through slides on an overhead projector and emphasizing Soul City’s potential to spur economic development in a depressed region. He was followed by Harvey Gantt, who described the land-use plan, and Skip Tolbert, who detailed the financial projections. When it was time for questions, the HUD staffers had many. What kind of industrial commitments had McKissick secured? How would he cover the front-end costs of building a new town without taking on unmanageable debt? What kind of cooperation could he expect from local officials? McKissick parried the questions skillfully, his experience as a trial lawyer serving him well. Industry was enthusiastic, he explained, but was waiting for HUD to make a commitment. A loan guarantee of $33 million would ensure the project’s economic feasibility even with no other funding. And local officials were coming around as they realized the benefits Soul City would provide for the entire area.
When the meeting ended, McKissick felt confident he had addressed HUD’s concerns. But as weeks went by without an answer, he grew worried. In April, he wrote to William Nicoson to emphasize the need for a quick decision. “It should be clear that we are progressing on every front and that we have a high degree of cooperation from the State of North Carolina, regional government, local government, and from the various federal departments and agencies,” he wrote. “What we need now to move ahead aggressively on industrial locations and additional federal support is announcement of the offer of commitment.”
A few days later, he wrote to Nicoson’s boss, Sam Jackson. He had talked with the Chase executives, who had recently been in touch with Jackson, and the message they relayed was not encouraging. The executives were under the impression that the project was no closer to approval than it was a year earlier, and McKissick blamed Jackson for giving them that impression. Now, Chase was insisting on a letter of intent from HUD before it would loan him more money. “Some persons cannot understand what they call the ‘low priority’ that this project has,” McKissick wrote. “HUD’s failure to give assurances that a guarantee would be forthcoming has most negatively affected our project.”
Jackson responded informally in late April, then followed up with a formal letter on May 10, assuring McKissick that his presentation was “excellent” and had “favorably impressed” the staff. But there were still many questions to be addressed before HUD could approve his application. The economic analysis drafted by Hammer, Greene, Siler projected the number of jobs that would be created each year but provided no details about the types of jobs or how much they would pay. HUD also doubted the capability of McKissick’s team, noting that it lacked “the extensive background in land development and sales normally assumed necessary for such an undertaking.” For that reason, Jackson explained, McKissick should find a partner, preferably one with expertise in housing. In addition, the staff had numerous smaller questions, some of which were so nitpicky as to be almost comical. For instance, although Gantt’s plan specified the number of parks in Soul City, HUD wanted to know the precise size of each one and where it would be located. HUD also wanted to know how much tickets would cost on the regional bus system, when the town would switch from bottled to natural gas, and how it would finance an ambulance service.
HUD’s anxiety over Soul City stemmed mainly from its status as a freestanding town. Having never worked on a project so complex—and having received little guidance about how to proceed—the HUD staff was genuinely worried about making a mistake. To McKissick, however, the agency’s demands seemed unfair, especially since other developers had not faced the same scrutiny. He also believed the new requests were counterproductive. As he explained to Jackson, he had recently been in negotiations with Certain-teed Products, a manufacturer of building supplies, about acquiring an equity stake in Soul City. But Certain-teed had somehow learned of HUD’s insistence that he find a partner and had offered “quite unacceptable terms since they feel that we are over a barrel and must have them in order to proceed.” Now, McKissick feared, it would be impossible to find a partner willing to put money into the project. “It is terribly embarrassing and expensive to us to work like hell and accomplish something only to find that we are no closer to the guarantee.”
Despite his frustration, McKissick and his staff labored furiously over the next few weeks, researching industrial trends, meeting with HUD officials, and submitting follow-up reports. As part of a revised economic model, they slashed the amount of the requested loan guarantee from $33 million to $14 million. Chase, meanwhile, agreed to advance McKissick another $50,000 to tide him over until the application was approved. But as McKissick explained to Jackson, “It has already been spent to avert bankruptcy and we are broke again.”
Finally, on June 9, the board of directors of the New Community Development Corporation gathered to discuss Soul City’s application. The discussion was private, but the next day Jackson met with McKissick at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to brief him on the outcome. On the whole, the news was positive. Jackson explained that most of the items raised in his letter were of a technical nature and that McKissick’s staff had already addressed the bulk of them. As a result, the board had agreed to approve Soul City’s application as soon as McKissick submitted an “acceptable equity position.” But this condition was key. By “acceptable equity position,” the board meant that McKissick had to put up sufficient cash, either his own or that of investors. Ordinarily, HUD required developers to put up 20 percent of the amount of the loan guarantee, a figure well within the reach of most large real estate firms. In the case of Soul City, an experimental town with a worthy purpose, the board would accept $1.5 million—or just over 10 percent. But even that was a stretch for McKissick Enterprises. Its main asset was the Circle P Ranch, which was heavily mortgaged. And, as McKissick had repeatedly told Jackson, most banks and insurance companies refused to make financial commitments until HUD approved the loan guarantee. Still, he was encouraged by the board’s decision and left his meeting with Jackson determined to do whatever it took to meet this final condition.
* * *
WHILE MCKISSICK AND his staff went back and forth with HUD, they reached out to a variety of other federal agencies. The New Community Development Act not only authorized HUD to provide loan guarantees for developers, it also established a network of grants to finance the planning and development process. McKissick took full advantage of this network, filing a steady stream of applications with an assortment of agencies. And in contrast to his frustrations with HUD, he had surprising success. The Department of Agriculture provided money to establish a summer feeding program for impoverished children in Warren County. The Office of Economic Opportunity contributed $98,000 for the planning of a comprehensive health program. The Department of Labor funded the hiring of twenty-seven college students as summer counselors. And the Office of Minority Business Enterprise awarded the Warren Regional Planning Corporation $190,000 for planning purposes.
These grants kept Soul City humming during the long wait for HUD’s approval, providing jobs and resources for a community that had grown to more than twenty members. In addition to the Grooms, McNeills, and Careys (who had adopted a second child, an infant named Anthony), McKissick’s longtime assistants Dot and Margaret Waller were now working on-site, as was Harvey Gantt. But the most prominent addition was McKissick himself. He and Evelyn moved down in the summer of 1971, exchanging the Harlem brownstone they had occupied since 1966 for a yellow trailer on the edge of a cornfield. Their only son, Floyd Jr., was away at college, but they brought along their youngest daughter, Charmaine, who was still in high school. It was a difficult move for a sixteen-year-old. In New York, Charmaine had attended the LaGuardia high school for performing arts (later made famous by the movie Fame) and spent most of her time singing, acting, and dancing. In Warren County, she attended John Graham High, which offered classes in bricklaying, welding, and vocational agriculture. Lik
e her siblings, though, Charmaine took for granted that she would participate in whatever adventure her father embarked on. Besides, there was a consolation in moving to Warren County. On her visits to Soul City, Charmaine had begun dating Middock Kearney, the teenage son of the late caretaker. Handsome and full of life, Middock had eyes that seemed to change from gray to green depending on his clothes. He was just the kind of boy to make a girl forget what she had left behind in New York.
Also arriving that summer was McKissick’s oldest daughter, Joycelyn, and her husband, Lew Myers. A native of Pennsylvania and a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, Myers was working as director of Upward Bound at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education when he met Joycelyn, who was studying for her master’s degree in teaching. Two of the few Black students at Harvard, Myers and Joycelyn began dating in the fall of 1969 and married the next May. At McKissick’s invitation, they spent their honeymoon in Soul City, making the twelve-hour drive from Cambridge in Myers’s Volkswagen Beetle. The first thing Myers noticed when they arrived was the red clay, which, when not wet, coated everything in a coppery powder. “I didn’t know whether to roll the windows up and suffocate from the heat or keep them down and suffocate from the dust,” he recalled. But he was transfixed by the beauty of the land and by McKissick’s vision of a city where Black people would control their economic destiny. So when his father-in-law offered him a job, Myers readily accepted. Like Gantt, he had to explain to friends why he was leaving Cambridge for a speculative venture in the middle of nowhere. “My friends said, ‘Lew, you’re crazy. You smoked too many joints. You’re giving up Harvard to go to Warren County, North Cackalacky, to do what?’”
But Myers trusted his instincts, and he and Joycelyn moved into a trailer behind the old manor house. The couple cut a striking figure in Warren County. Myers was tall and lean, with a full beard and high afro, while Joycelyn wore bright dashikis and an African scarf wrapped around her head. To locals, they looked like H. Rap Brown and Angela Davis, Black militants on the FBI’s “most wanted” list. Joycelyn was especially imposing. A writer and poet, she carried a black notebook everywhere, recording all that she saw and heard. But she was more than a silent observer. Like her father, she was outspoken and blunt, with a vocabulary so profane it had gotten her kicked out of Spelman College. As one staff member recalled, “She would come to a meeting and just cuss. And she wasn’t even working on the project.”
Myers was more affable, venturing out to talk with residents and picking up kids for the summer feeding camp in his Beetle. Yet even he baffled locals. One morning after a long run, he was stretching by the side of the road when a Black farmer in a pickup truck stopped and asked what he and the other folks at the Circle P Ranch were doing.
“We’re building a new town,” Myers answered.
“When are y’all gonna be done?” the man asked.
“Thirty years.”
The man looked at Myers as if he was from Mars.
* * *
ALTHOUGH GRANTS KEPT Soul City alive, the HUD loan guarantee was the big prize, and McKissick kept his eyes fixed firmly on it. In August, he found a company willing to acquire an equity stake in the project. The National Corporation for Housing Partnerships, a for-profit company established by Congress to facilitate the building of low-income housing, agreed to become a general partner and invest five hundred thousand dollars in Soul City. The deal not only helped McKissick satisfy HUD’s equity requirements; it also addressed concerns about his management capabilities. With more than five hundred field consultants, the NCHP had a wealth of expertise in housing and residential development.
No sooner had McKissick and his staff cleared one obstacle, however, than another appeared. HUD now had questions about the value of the Circle P Ranch, which McKissick had included in his equity statement. His accountants submitted an appraisal showing that the land had appreciated substantially since McKissick purchased it two and a half years earlier. But HUD questioned the accuracy of the appraisal. It also raised concerns about including the mortgaged land as part of McKissick’s equity, even though Chase had agreed to subordinate its loan to any obligations Soul City accrued with the federal government.
Like most of McKissick’s troubles, this difficulty was the result of an overly cautious bureaucracy. But at least one problem was self-inflicted. In August, a Baltimore Sun reporter named Walter R. Gordon traveled to Soul City. Whether he arrived with a jaundiced view of the project or formed one while there is unclear. But the article he published was highly skeptical, emphasizing the desperate poverty of the region (“In some ways, Warren County is worse off than any place in Mississippi”), the inexperience of McKissick’s staff (“None of the people here has ever operated a large business enterprise, and it shows”), and the enormous challenges ahead (“The chasm dividing the present dream from the future reality could hardly be greater if Mr. McKissick intended to build this city on the moon instead of these gentle hills 10 miles from the Virginia border”). The article also suggested that Soul City would be segregated. “It is clear from conversations with Mr. McKissick and his aides,” Gordon wrote, “that they visualize Soul City as a virtually all Black city, although there is no way they can legally exclude whites and they stop just short of saying they would like to do so.” This statement might have been dismissed as Gordon’s own interpretation, especially since, in response to a query about whether he wanted whites to live in Soul City, McKissick had responded, “That’s a racist question.” As an experienced trial lawyer, McKissick should have known to stop there, to leave well enough alone and not elaborate. But for some reason—perhaps out of exasperation, perhaps to be provocative, or perhaps because, after a lifetime of discrimination, he still felt like a “black boy in a white land”—he returned to the question later in the interview. “If you are asking me, do I want to live side by side with white people all my life, I don’t,” he said. “I want to live with my people.”
That quote ended the article, and nearly ended McKissick’s dream. HUD had made clear from the beginning that it would not—as a matter of law, could not—support a segregated community. Yet here was McKissick saying that’s exactly what he wanted. When Sam Jackson read the article he was livid. He had been fighting on Soul City’s behalf for two years, assuring everyone in Washington that McKissick was not a separatist. And now, in one sentence, McKissick had made him look like a liar. In an unusually stern letter, Jackson reminded McKissick that his application to HUD claimed Soul City would “seek to become America’s first city where racism isn’t tolerated.” He then noted that McKissick’s statement in the Sun conflicted with that claim. “Would you please verify the accuracy of the quotation,” he wrote. “I am sure that you are aware of the fact that a project undertaken on the basis of the social policy reflected in the quotes would not qualify for Title VII assistance.”
Responding to Jackson a few days later, McKissick did not address the accuracy of the quote. Instead, invoking his long history on the front lines of the movement, he argued that he shouldn’t have to repeatedly defend his commitment to integration. “The record speaks for itself,” he declared. He also argued that anyone who questioned Soul City’s racial goals need only visit to see that whites were employed at every level and that his staff was working closely with state and local officials, who were mostly white. “This would not have been possible had our project been representative of the negativism and divisiveness indicated in the article by Mr. Gordon.”
McKissick’s response was enough to mollify Jackson, but other HUD officials were still uneasy. In mid-September, the board of the New Community Development Corporation met again to consider Soul City’s application. Prior to the meeting, McKissick had submitted an updated equity statement that included his agreement with the National Corporation for Housing Partnerships, additional documentation on the value of the Circle P Ranch, and the promise of five hundred thousand dollars from a group of New York investors. With that issue addressed, he expected
the board to finally approve an offer of commitment. He had even broadcast that expectation to his creditors, who were growing impatient. But when the board met, it deferred a vote on Soul City. Instead, as Jackson explained in a letter on September 28, it wanted a revised list of industrial prospects and more details about the interest they had shown in Soul City.
Now it was McKissick’s turn to explode. On October 1, he dictated a long letter to Jackson, complaining bitterly about the imposition of yet another condition. “Each month a new hurdle is placed before us,” he protested. “How can we possibly finish the race?” It wasn’t just a question of finishing the race, however. It was a question of staying on his feet. The board’s failure to approve the application had pushed McKissick to the edge of bankruptcy. In addition to owing back taxes in North Carolina and New York, he was heavily in debt. He had already been forced to close his office in Harlem and curtail operations at Soul City because HUD had not yet renewed the planning grant. In June, he had persuaded his creditors to hold off until September 1. On September 1, he had persuaded them to hold off until September 25. Now they were hounding him about what had happened at the board’s meeting. Meanwhile, his staff was growing anxious. Harvey Gantt had recently departed to open his own architectural firm in Charlotte, and other employees were likely to follow. Perhaps most distressing, Carey’s wife was scheduled to have a hysterectomy in the coming days, and the company’s health insurance had lapsed. “Gordon is now forced to raise money to keep up the family,” McKissick informed Jackson. As for himself, he didn’t know how much longer he could last:
Three years of my life have gone into this project. I’m now a very, very poor man having placed all of my property, as well as future earnings, on the line for this project. Thus, I will be compelled to make some personal decisions within the next ten days regarding my future status. The embarrassment will be extremely difficult but at least sanity will prevail, good physical health and my family will then be stable. While I am not going to make a public announcement, I am sure my creditors within the next ten days will be on the attack unless McKissick Enterprises secures additional funds. They are ready, willing, and able to attack me, the republican party, and everyone else.