by Thomas Healy
Then, in his own hand, he scrawled a personal postscript: “What really disturbs me is that people both black and white will long remember the failure of Soul City. Those who were on the verge of losing faith will [have] reason to lose faith.”
Jackson must have sensed what was coming. For at 6:10 that night, before McKissick posted his letter, Jackson telephoned the office at Soul City. The board was meeting again in mid-October, he explained, and this time he hoped to have better news. A few weeks later, George Romney wrote McKissick himself, attempting to clarify the board’s position and offer his own reassurance. “I would like to confirm to you that based on the information presently available to us, although incomplete as regards certain aspects of the project, the Board believes there is a good prospect that the project can be found deserving of Title VII guarantee assistance.” As always with HUD, there were caveats. Romney noted that the environmental impact statement McKissick had submitted would need to be reviewed by a variety of government agencies, a process that could take three months. In addition, the board had sent McKissick’s financial projections to an outside consultant for an independent analysis. Finally, any approval by the board would come with conditions that had to be satisfied before the money was actually released.
It was not a guarantee. But it was as close to one as McKissick had received. And it came not from his friend Sam Jackson but from the secretary of HUD, who had little reason to give him false hope. As if to confirm the positive implications of Romney’s letter, McKissick soon received more good news: HUD had decided to renew Soul City’s planning grant for another year. Having teetered on the brink of failure, he would soon have the money to keep his dream alive.
• 11 •
“Theory of the Sugar Tit”
Not long after McKissick received Romney’s letter, he sent his own letter to Bob Brown at the White House. McKissick had stayed in close contact with Brown since his announcement three years earlier, frequently asking him to intervene at HUD or put in a good word with other agencies. As with his letters to Jackson, his correspondence with Brown was often erratic, veering among indignation, flattery, and entreaty. Just a few weeks earlier, after the two friends had seen each other in Washington, McKissick had dropped Brown a note saying how nice it had been to talk with “an old home-state boy” before requesting that he make a “special thrust” to secure federal support for Soul City.
Now McKissick offered to do something for Brown. With the 1972 presidential election less than a year away, McKissick proposed that he, Brown, and Jackson launch an effort to mobilize Black support for Nixon’s campaign. The Democratic Party was in disarray and had taken Black voters for granted, he explained. If Republicans emphasized the tangible benefits they had provided since assuming power, they could break the Democratic grip on the minority vote. Their effort should focus on the cities—on Cleveland, New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco. They should assemble a staff, recruit other Black leaders, and spread their message through the media. Most importantly, they should make the administration’s support for Soul City a centerpiece of their pitch.
McKissick’s offer marked a fateful shift in both his politics and his struggle to build Soul City. A longtime Democrat, he had been critical of Nixon almost from the beginning of his presidency, denouncing his lack of follow-through on Black capitalism and his demagoguery on the issue of crime. In a column for the New York Amsterdam News, shortly after the 1968 election, he argued that Nixon had “no particular commitment to the black masses” and was indebted only to “large white corporations.” In another column he condemned the administration’s surveillance of radical groups, while in yet another he decried Nixon’s approach to criminal justice, declaring him “one of the nation’s leading proponents of law and order—racist style.” But whatever his opinion of Nixon, McKissick needed help. In spite of Romney’s letter, there was no guarantee HUD would ultimately approve his application. He had received numerous assurances in the past, only to find out later that a new request had been made or a new condition imposed. And even if HUD approved his application, he would need help dealing with the agency during the development phase. So he did what businessmen have been doing since the dawn of politics: he offered his support to those with the power to grant him what he wanted. As Eva Clayton explained later, “He was being expedient. He felt he had to do it.”
McKissick’s motive for supporting Nixon was irrelevant to Brown and Jackson, who readily accepted his offer. At a strategy session in January, the three men crafted a plan to reach Black voters, then spent the next few weeks working behind the scenes to implement it. McKissick threw himself into the effort, contacting potential supporters, pestering the campaign for resources, and drafting a confidential “Statement of Principles and Purpose.” It was a starkly pragmatic document, arguing that the Democratic Party, “which admittedly speaks more directly to the problems of minorities,” had a poor record of accomplishment; that minorities would be taken for granted if they failed to participate in the two-party system; and that the Republican Party, although more conservative in rhetoric, was “best suited to serve the needs of Black People” in the upcoming election. In fact, McKissick explained, it was the conservative nature of the GOP that made it an effective advocate for Black people. “Because the Republican Party seeks to maintain a public conservative posture, it has been able to throw many liberal rocks and hide its hands.” To some, this might sound cynical, but to McKissick it simply reflected reality. “The game of politics is sophisticated,” he wrote. It “cannot be dealt with in terms of rhetoric and non-accomplishments, but must be dealt with in terms of power, action and economics.”
As if to demonstrate his own sophistication, McKissick’s public pronouncements soon took on a different tone. Whereas before he had freely and vigorously criticized the president, he now held his tongue. When asked in March about Nixon’s statement that Congress should pass a nationwide moratorium on school busing, McKissick initially dismissed the move as a political stunt. Then, apparently remembering his new loyalties, he demurred, telling the press he wouldn’t say anything more about it.
* * *
MCKISSICK’S DECISION TO support Nixon was only half the equation. There was also the question of whether Nixon would reciprocate, whether a president who had embraced the rhetoric of “law and order” and staked his political prospects on appealing to white southerners would welcome the endorsement of a Black militant. More to the point, would he be grateful enough to ensure the administration’s support of Soul City? For most politicians, it would have been an impossibly fine line to walk. But Nixon had been walking that line his entire career.
As vice president, under Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon had been known as the GOP’s “civil rights workhorse,” in the words of Jet magazine. He had led the effort to eliminate discrimination in government contracts, praised Brown v. Board of Education, and condemned Southern Democrats bent on thwarting integration. “A political party at the national level cannot long endure or merit support when it’s half for and half against equality of treatment,” he declared in a 1956 speech in Harlem. When Ghana secured its independence from Britain that same year, Nixon traveled to Africa to mark the occasion. And when the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was in danger of failing in the Senate, he played a key role in pushing it past Southern opposition. Writing him afterward, Martin Luther King Jr. praised Nixon for his “assiduous and dauntless courage” and his “devotion to the highest mandates of moral law.” The NAACP named him an honorary member.
Nixon continued to court Black voters during his 1960 campaign for president. In fact, for most of the campaign, he was viewed as more liberal on racial issues than John F. Kennedy. While Nixon promised to enforce Brown, eliminate literacy tests in voting, and end discrimination in housing, Kennedy assured southern officials he would not use federal troops to end segregation. It wasn’t until the eve of the election, when King was jailed during a sit-in in Georgia, that the narrative flipped. Nixon resisted
calls to intervene, fearing a backlash from southern whites. But Kennedy, at the urging of liberal aides, called Coretta Scott King to express his sympathies, while his brother Robert appealed personally to the judge in the case. When King was released shortly afterward and news of Kennedy’s involvement spread, Black voters moved sharply in his direction. Even then, Nixon received 32 percent of the Black vote, a figure no Republican presidential candidate has come close to matching since.
During his years out of office, Nixon remained outwardly sympathetic to the cause of racial equality, urging Republicans in Congress to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But when he ran for president again, in 1968, he adopted a new strategy. Observing how Johnson’s association with civil rights had alienated the Democratic Party’s traditional base of white southerners, Nixon decided to woo those voters himself. Under the guidance of a young aide named Harry Dent, he pursued what came to be known as the “southern strategy”—an attempt to break the Democrats’ century-old monopoly on the South with tacit appeals to white racism. Campaigning on a platform of “law and order,” Nixon cast himself as the spokesman for the “silent center” (later rebranded the “silent majority”) that was fed up with the protests of the civil rights and antiwar movements. His choice of Spiro Agnew as a running mate only amplified that message. As governor of Maryland, Agnew had publicly blamed Black leaders for the 1968 riots in Baltimore, calling them “caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type of leaders.”
Still, Nixon wasn’t prepared to give up the Black vote entirely. In his “Bridges to Human Dignity” speech, in 1968, he had touted Black capitalism as an alternative to the liberal welfarism of the Great Society. He had also reached out privately to prominent Black leaders such as McKissick and Roy Innis and had hired Bob Brown to burnish his image in the Black community. His efforts didn’t persuade everyone (Jackie Robinson warned that if Nixon were elected, “we as Negroes are in serious trouble”), but they were enough to make up some of the ground Republicans lost in 1964, when Barry Goldwater received only 4 percent of the Black vote.
Once in the White House, Nixon took several steps to appease Black voters. He created the Office of Minority Business Enterprise to promote Black entrepreneurialism and adopted the so-called Philadelphia Plan, which mandated affirmative action in government contracts. He also hired a handful of high-profile Blacks to serve in his administration, including James Farmer, who was appointed assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. And when Whitney Young, head of the Urban League, died of a heart attack in Nigeria, in March 1971, Nixon sent a plane to collect his body, then delivered a eulogy at his funeral.
To many Black critics, these were empty gestures. They noted that the Office of Minority Business Enterprise was severely underfunded and that Nixon had failed to appoint any Black officials to his cabinet. They also seized on a memo written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, urging a policy of “benign neglect” on racial matters. At times, Nixon went beyond “benign neglect,” as though determined to antagonize Blacks in his effort to pander to whites. When Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas was forced to resign in 1969 over conflict-of-interest charges, Nixon nominated the conservative southerner Clement Haynsworth to replace him. And when Haynsworth was rejected in a bipartisan vote, Nixon nominated G. Harrold Carswell, who had once run for the Georgia state legislature on a platform of segregation. (Carswell was also defeated, forcing Nixon to nominate the moderate Minnesotan Harry Blackmun.) Nixon also snubbed Black congressmen who sought meetings with him, attempted to dilute the Voting Rights Act of 1970, and called for a national moratorium on busing as a means of integration. James Farmer was so dismayed by the administration’s record that he resigned less than two years into the job, while Bishop Stephen G. Spottswood, the chairman of the NAACP’s national board, called the Nixon White House the first “anti-Negro” administration since Woodrow Wilson’s.
And yet, such was Nixon’s fear of losing that when he launched his reelection bid in 1972, he held out hope of attracting a subset of Black voters—what Moynihan termed “the silent black majority.” Instead of appealing to these voters with coded rhetoric about “law and order,” however, his campaign decided on a more direct enticement: money. Campaign aides had already outlined a plan to leverage the advantages of incumbency on the president’s behalf. Known as the Responsiveness Program, the plan called for agency heads to channel grants and federal contracts to applicants who campaigned for Nixon. The program was designed to increase support among all racial groups, but special emphasis was placed on minority voters. In the words of one campaign document, “a selective funding approach will furnish encouragement incentives for Black individuals, firms and organizations whose support will have a multiplier effect on Black vote support for the President. This will call for working with OMBE, SBA, Department of Labor, OEO, HUD, HEW, and the Justice Department. What we do economically will be key politically.”
Over the next few months, that’s exactly what happened. The Committee to Reelect the President (known officially as CRP, but mocked as “CREEP” by Nixon’s detractors) established a Black voter division and hired Paul Jones as its executive director. A former Peace Corps administrator who once dated Angela Davis, Jones had campaigned for Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential race. But like a number of Black Democrats, he accepted a job in the Nixon administration, believing he could do more for minorities within the system than outside it. Jones worked briefly at HUD and the Justice Department before moving to CRP in January 1972. There, he occupied an office next to G. Gordon Liddy, the former FBI agent who oversaw the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Jones’s duties were more mundane, if just as legally dubious. He spent much of his time working with Bob Brown to recruit Blacks who were already receiving federal grants and to funnel future grants to Blacks who agreed to come on board. Their efforts were described in a memo from White House aide Fred Malek to campaign chairman John Mitchell. “Bob Brown and his staff have identified all blacks who are receiving, or have received, money from this administration,” Malek wrote. “These recipients will be utilized as a source of contributions and volunteers, and as a group of visible blacks to be used to reach the voters in their area of influence.”
The Responsiveness Program was a success, both in terms of increasing support generally and in targeting minority voters specifically. One Black businessman who received a $2.1 million contract from the SBA sent letters to two thousand minority contractors, soliciting support for Nixon. Another made numerous donations during the course of the campaign after being informed that his ability to obtain future contracts was dependent on his support for the president.
But although the program had paid dividends, it had not yet attracted a major Black leader who was willing to speak on Nixon’s behalf. James Farmer had received a $150,000 grant for a new think tank after assuring Jones and Brown he would support the president. But Farmer insisted on keeping a low profile, to protect his credibility, and never actually delivered on his promise. Thus, when McKissick expressed a willingness to support Nixon, the campaign welcomed him with open arms, appointing him to an ad hoc executive advisory committee and identifying him as the president’s chief Black spokesman.
And once McKissick was in the fold, his application for Soul City moved quickly toward approval. In April, his staff met with HUD officials to go over the final details of its offer of commitment. In May, the Office of Minority Business Enterprise awarded Soul City a five-hundred-thousand-dollar grant to plan an industrial park named after the Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph. And in early June, the Office of Economic Opportunity approved a $1 million grant for the creation of HealthCo, a comprehensive health-care center for Warren and Vance counties.
Most significantly, McKissick heard from the man himself. According to T. T. Clayton, he and McKissick drove to Washington for an appointment with Nixon in the spring or early summer
of 1972. They met alone with the president, Clayton recalled, and when McKissick expressed concern about the loan guarantee, Nixon assured him everything would be fine.
“Don’t worry, Floyd,” he said, “you’re going to get your money.”
* * *
WAS THERE A quid pro quo between Nixon and McKissick? That would later become the narrative in the media, but the evidence is inconclusive. For one thing, there is no record of McKissick and Clayton meeting with Nixon in the Presidential Daily Diary, which recorded nearly all of Nixon’s appointments and activities. And several people deeply involved in the project, including Gordon Carey and Lew Myers, say they never heard of such a meeting. Eva Clayton backs up her husband’s account, describing T.T.’s visit to the White House as one of the highlights of his career. He told the same story for years, she says, often mimicking Nixon’s throaty growl. McKissick’s daughter Charmaine also recalls her father talking about the meeting with Nixon, though she is unsure whether it took place in 1972 or perhaps at a later point in McKissick’s dealings with HUD.
Even if the meeting took place as described, Nixon’s statement is ambiguous. Was he promising McKissick the loan guarantee in exchange for his support? Or was he informing McKissick that his application had been approved on the merits? The history of the Responsiveness Program would suggest the former, especially given Bob Brown’s role and his close friendship with McKissick. But Brown steadfastly denied exercising improper influence on behalf of Soul City or any other project. “None of that was ever done, and there is nobody who can ever say that Bob Brown called him up and said we are going to give you a contract over here if you vote for the President,” he testified before the Senate Watergate Committee. “There was no quid pro quo kind of deals made.” And in the mountains of evidence the Senate later gathered about the Responsiveness Program, there is not a single reference to Soul City or McKissick’s efforts to secure a loan guarantee from HUD.