by Thomas Healy
On the other hand, there is evidence that HUD was on its way to approving the guarantee even before McKissick offered his support to Nixon. There are Sam Jackson’s numerous assurances to McKissick over the course of two years. There is Romney’s letter to McKissick the previous fall stating that “there is a good prospect that the project can be found deserving” of federal support. And, although it is unclear whether McKissick knew it, the board of the New Community Development Corporation had given his application tentative approval at its meeting in December 1971. The approval was conditioned on McKissick satisfying the terms laid out in Romney’s letter, but in mid-May, Jackson informed the board that McKissick had done so and that he was preparing an offer of commitment. The board made no mention of McKissick switching parties. To the contrary, a HUD lawyer who attended the December meeting told colleagues that the board’s decision was “based more on a desire to give a black developer a chance than anything else.”
Instead of a quid pro quo, then, McKissick’s endorsement of Nixon might best be characterized as an insurance policy—a way to guard against the risk that HUD would back out of its commitment at the last minute. Doing so would be difficult if McKissick, rather than being a vocal critic of the president, was one of his staunchest allies.
Whatever the understanding between McKissick and Nixon, what happened next is clear. In late May, McKissick wrote a check to the Nixon campaign, buying five one-hundred-dollar tickets to a fundraising gala for Black Nixon supporters at the Washington Hilton. A few weeks later, he appeared at the gala to give the keynote address. It was a boisterous and star-studded affair. More than 2,500 guests packed into the hotel’s grand ballroom, including Jim Brown, Jackie Robinson (who had overcome his earlier doubts about Nixon), and Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X. Music was provided by jazz legend Lionel Hampton, who introduced a dance number called “Do the Nixon,” while his band played a new campaign song:
We need Nixon
Let’s stay with Nixon
He’s the leader we can trust
Our man is Nixon
He’s right on fixin’
A better world for all of us.
The music was not the only entertainment. As the attendees tucked into their meals, they heard from an eclectic group of speakers. Jerome Green, a Vietnam veteran from Chicago, informed the crowd that there were seventeen thousand Black soldiers back home “ready to go all out for Mr. Nixon.” Ethel Allen, a Philadelphia city council member, predicted that Black women would vote en masse for the president. And the Rev. William Holmes Borders, a prominent preacher from Atlanta, declared that Nixon “had done more for blacks than anyone since Jesus Christ,” to which an audience member responded, “Now walk the water, Reverend!” The audience also heard from Nixon campaign manager (and former attorney general) John Mitchell, who was there with his famously outspoken wife, Martha. Touting the administration’s record on minority issues, Mitchell urged the attendees to return to their communities and spread the word that a vote for Nixon would help the president realize his “goal of an America for all Americans.”
McKissick spoke last. It was his coming-out party as a Republican, and he didn’t disappoint. Wearing a white dinner jacket over a black dress shirt, he delivered a rousing speech written especially for the occasion. Titled “The Theory of the Sugar Tit,” it explained why the former CORE leader had switched political parties, and why his audience should, too. According to McKissick, Black voters in 1972 faced many of the same problems as in 1932, when racism and economic deprivation threatened their very survival. In that earlier election, Blacks had abandoned their traditional allegiance to the Republican Party, throwing their support behind Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats. Yet despite controlling Congress for forty years, despite controlling the White House for all but twelve of those years, and despite controlling the mayor’s office in nearly every major city in the country, the Democratic Party had failed to cure the ills that afflicted the Black population—poverty, joblessness, crime, and lack of affordable housing. Instead, Democrats had attempted to pacify Black voters in the same way parents often tried to quiet their babies: with a sugar tit—a cube of sugar wrapped in cloth. “If you were a Southerner, and you knew what a sugar tit really is, it ain’t milk,” McKissick told the crowd. “It’s a substitute for milk, and it’s a pacifier, and it’s something that makes you think you’ve got something when you ain’t got it.”
The sugar tit does not solve anything, McKissick explained. It makes matters worse, leading the parents to believe they are providing nourishment and making the baby forget what real milk tastes like. This is what had happened with Blacks and the Democratic Party. The party, believing it had met the needs of minorities with its empty rhetoric, had ceased trying to cure their ills. Black voters, meanwhile, had become so accustomed to a diet of sweet talk they had stopped pleading for real sustenance. The only way to break out of this dynamic, McKissick told the attendees, was to use their political leverage to demand results. And in 1972, he argued, the Republican Party was the only one with a record of accomplishment. It was the Nixon administration that had doubled funding for historically Black colleges. It was the Nixon administration that had created the Office of Minority Business Enterprise. And it was the Nixon administration that was trying to bring soldiers home from Vietnam.
“I guess some will still think we ought to hang on to the sugar tit,” McKissick concluded. “That’s ok. But me—I’ve tasted a little bit of cream and a little bit of milk and I know why I endured those fifty-two arrests and why my kids stood such abuse. There’s food in the land—it’s goodbye old sugar tit!”
McKissick’s speech was a hit, drawing laughter and applause from the crowd. Even Mitchell, usually dour and grim-faced, couldn’t repress a smile. “A lot of people are going to be surprised this year,” Paul Jones told a reporter afterward. “The President only received 12 percent of the Black vote in 1968, but he’s going to do much, much better this time because he’s earned it.”
As for McKissick, he had earned the gratitude of the Nixon campaign. Over the next few weeks, he received letters of appreciation from Jones, Bob Brown, and Maurice Stans, CRP’s finance chair. But the most important letter came on July 28, from Sam Jackson. “Dear Gentlemen,” it began, “You have applied under the Urban Growth and New Community Development Act of 1970 for a commitment to guarantee up to $14,000,000 principal amount of obligations…” The letter went on for several pages, dense and full of legalese. But buried in the second paragraph was the sentence McKissick had been waiting so long to read: “Based upon the information contained in your application and otherwise submitted by you to us, we have made the determinations required under the Act for purposes of the commitment hereby offered and are prepared, subject to the conditions specified below, to enter into an agreement providing for the guarantee under the Act of up to $14,000,000.”
Setting aside the bureaucratic jargon and that worrisome reference to “conditions specified below,” it was the sweetest letter McKissick had ever received. After three years of planning, negotiations, and an endless stream of excuses, HUD had finally approved his application to build Soul City. A dream that had once seemed fantastical to everyone but him was about to become reality.
Goodbye old sugar tit—hello milk!
PART III
• 12 •
Black Elephants
When McKissick offered to support Nixon’s reelection, he had assured Bob Brown he would dedicate himself fully to the campaign. “As you well know, Bob, once I commit myself to a project, my commitment is total,” he had written. “I am also one who believes in systematically executing that commitment.”
Over the next several months, he made good on that promise. Three weeks after receiving Jackson’s letter, he officially switched parties, changing his registration from Democrat to Republican. And three weeks after that, he attended his new party’s national convention in Miami Beach. The Democrats had met in south Florida a we
ek earlier, but whereas their convention was contentious and unruly, with bitter debates lasting through the night, the Republican gathering was placid and uneventful. There was no last-minute challenge to the front-runner, no drama over the selection of a running mate. Instead, the event was like a renewal of vows, with the delegates reaffirming their devotion to Nixon and the president promising four more blissful years. Even the protests outside the convention (staged by Students for a Democratic Society, the Yippies, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) couldn’t spoil the positive vibes inside.
The only surprising thing about the convention was its racial composition. One hundred and thirty-eight Black men and women took the floor as delegates, the most in party history. And although Black delegates still accounted for only 10 percent of the total, that was a dramatic increase from 1968, when just twenty-six Blacks had participated. Several Black celebrities were also on hand, including Sammy Davis Jr., who made headlines when he awkwardly hugged the president on stage during the nominating concert.
McKissick played a prominent role in the proceedings, working the halls of the convention center, attending a party for Black delegates at the Eden Roc Hotel, and testifying before the platform committee wearing a black elephant lapel pin engraved with the words “’72 Self-Determination.” But his main reason for being in Miami was to promote Soul City, and he took full advantage of the opportunity, paying $250 to rent space in the grand lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel, where many delegates were staying. There, under crystal chandeliers blazing in gilded mirrors, he set up a Soul City exhibit, complete with pamphlets, charts, maps, and a poster-size copy of a New York Times editorial praising the project. He and Carey took turns manning the exhibit, joined by Sam Tidmore, a former linebacker for the Cleveland Browns who had recently been added to the staff. It was an exhausting week—McKissick slept only a few hours each night—but highly productive. Hundreds of delegates passed by the booth each day, and by the end of the convention McKissick had scheduled meetings with eight firms interested in Soul City, including a box company, a hotel chain, a food-services supplier, an electronics firm, and a wigmaker.
A few weeks later, he was back in New York, where he launched the National Committee for a Two-Party System, a group designed ostensibly to encourage ticket-splitting among Black voters but in reality a vehicle to promote Nixon’s reelection. To kick things off, the committee held a fundraiser at the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. It was another glamorous affair, featuring Nixon’s younger brother Edward, boxing champ Archie Moore, and Juanita Poitier, the ex-wife of Sidney Poitier. And with five hundred guests paying twenty-five dollars a plate, it brought in a tidy sum for the committee’s reelection efforts.
But if McKissick was enjoying the fruits of his relationship with Nixon, there was also a cost. Many Black luminaries who supported Nixon came under heavy criticism from the Black community. Sammy Davis Jr. was mocked by the Black press for embracing the president at the convention. James Brown performed to half-empty venues while protesters chanted “James Brown, Nixon’s clown.” And Charles Hurst, the president of Malcolm X College in Chicago, arrived at work one day to find his office riddled with bullets.
No one fired shots at McKissick, but he, too, was attacked. The leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus issued a statement condemning him and other prominent Black figures for supporting Nixon. “The President has bought them, and they have sold out,” the caucus charged. Julian Bond, a Georgia state legislator and president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, was more blunt, describing McKissick and other Black Nixon supporters as “political prostitutes.” A letter to the editor in the New York Amsterdam News went so far as to compare him to Judas Iscariot. “I can dig Brother McKissick’s devotion to this project, but not at the cost of the nationwide Black Community,” the writer stated. “At a time when blacks are trying to consolidate their political power to kick this turkey out of the White House, we are confronted by Negro leaders getting their pieces of silver.”
McKissick was stung by the charges of selling out, but he didn’t let on. Instead he embraced the criticism, referring to himself as a “happy hooker.” He also fired back, arguing that it was George McGovern, not Nixon, who had betrayed the poor. During the Democratic primary, he pointed out, McGovern had embraced a guaranteed annual income with the slogan “$6,500 or Fight.” But recently, after realizing he needed donations from Wall Street, the nominee had lowered his proposal to $2,500. Why were the members of the Black caucus so silent now, McKissick asked in a press release on September 1. “The answer is because their presidential candidate sold them down the river for a pat on the head from Big Business.” And what about McGovern’s running mate, Sargent Shriver, who had spent the past week in Louisiana boasting that his ancestors had fought with the Confederacy? If the members of the Black caucus “are a little sheepish today, well, that’s understandable,” McKissick stated. “They’ve got a plate of crow and humble pie to eat this morning.”
Meanwhile, McKissick’s alliance with the president went ahead full steam. That fall, the campaign published a full-page ad featuring a photograph of McKissick above the caption, “McKissick’s Dream was Soul City. Democrats endorsed it. Republicans supported it. That’s Action.” The campaign also launched the “Black Blitz,” a surrogate program in which Black leaders traveled the country giving speeches on Nixon’s behalf. Armed with a fact sheet listing Nixon’s accomplishments, the surrogates were advised to focus on Democrats and independents and to emphasize the theme of “Blacks as political hostage.” McKissick was the chief surrogate, making trips to Louisiana, Illinois, Arkansas, Texas, and Georgia. Speaking at the historic Wheat Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, he told the congregation it was time to break the chains that tied them to a single party. “We must become able to change with the seasons,” he declared. “So many of us are so rigid that we are unable to make a shift in strategy.”
The message appeared to be getting through. In September, Nixon received an endorsement from Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest Black organization in the country, with a membership of 6.3 million. A few days later, he picked up the backing of Jack E. Robinson, the president of the Boston branch of the NAACP. And a few days after that, Johnny Ford, the newly elected mayor of Tuskegee, Alabama, and a former campaign aide to Robert Kennedy, announced his support for the president. Endorsements also appeared in dozens of Black newspapers and magazines, including the Cleveland Call and Post, the Atlanta Daily World, the Oakland Post, and Black Business Digest.
It wasn’t just the Black establishment that was coming on board. In October, a group of young Black activists toured the country stumping for Nixon. Meeting with reporters in New York, the group’s leader, Mary Parish, explained that she had worked for Shirley Chisholm in the Democratic primary but was fed up with the party’s failure to deliver on its promises. “I have studied the record of black advancement since Nixon took office,” Parish told the press, “and am thoroughly convinced that Mr. Nixon is ‘The Man’ for us in 1972.”
Even some Black leaders who planned to vote for McGovern offered praise for the incumbent. Charles Evers, a civil rights activist in Mississippi whose brother Medgar had been killed outside his home in 1963, told reporters he understood why many Blacks were supporting the president. “Nixon has put more blacks in top positions of government than any other president,” he said. “And you can’t ignore the fact that blacks like Floyd McKissick and Sammy Davis Jr. have come out for the President.” Jim Brown agreed. Referring to HUD’s approval of the Soul City loan guarantee, Brown told reporters, “Ain’t no Black cat ever got that much, and McKissick can create a lot of jobs for Black people.”
The wave of endorsements buoyed the Nixon campaign, which was increasingly optimistic it would win a sizable share of the Black vote. To thank those who were responsible, the president invited his Executive Advisory Committee to the White House a few weeks before the election. In additio
n to McKissick, the group included Hurst, the president of Malcolm X College, and W. O. Walker, editor of the Cleveland Call and Post. As his visitors filed into the Cabinet Room, Nixon shook their hands and made small talk, noting that McKissick appeared to have lost weight. When McKissick responded that he was walking a mile every morning, the president quipped that he had given up exercise years ago. “I just got so tired after about a hundred yards,” he said with a self-deprecating chuckle. Once they were seated, Nixon emphasized the progress his administration was making in the field of education and the opportunities he hoped to provide “without regard to skin color.” McKissick, seated to Nixon’s right, expressed his own hopes for the future. “We’re changing the tide,” he said, predicting that Black voters would move decisively in the president’s direction.
When Election Day came, however, that prediction was not borne out. Although Nixon performed well in some cities (nearly one-third of Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, voted for him), nationwide he received only 13 percent of the Black vote, barely higher than his 1968 total. By contrast, conservative whites in both parties flocked to the president. Democrats who had voted in the primaries for the segregationist George Wallace went for Nixon three to one in the South and six to five in the North. Nixon’s dog whistle to whites, it turned out, was louder than his overture to Blacks.