by Thomas Healy
Jane Groom also reflected on the moment. As the shovels turned over the dirt, she thought of those in bondage who had once worked the same soil and wondered whether the “colored hour” had come at last. Then, being a realist, she began to think about what came next.
“There would be this weekend to celebrate, to laugh, to hold my shoulders a little bit higher,” she wrote in her memoir. “But Monday was just a few days away. My children would return to school. Jimmy would go back to work; and we as a family would be strengthened to face our own personal challenges in the months and years to come.”
• 14 •
Cream of the Crop
The groundbreaking was a public relations show, designed to pressure HUD into finalizing the deal. And it worked. Five weeks after the celebration, HUD notified McKissick that he had met all its conditions and could proceed to closing. Within a few months, he and his partners had formed the Soul City Company to oversee development of the project. And on March 6, 1974, the first $5 million in bonds were offered for sale on Wall Street. With repayment guaranteed by Uncle Sam, the bonds sold quickly, the bulk of them snapped up by Liberty National Life Insurance, a white-owned corporation based in Birmingham, Alabama. Speaking at a press conference in Washington, McKissick emphasized that the money from the bond sale was a loan, not a gift. “Nobody is giving Soul City any five million dollars,” he told reporters. “All HUD is saying is that if we go broke, they’ll guarantee our bond obligations to the investors, and I can guarantee to you that we’re not going to go broke.”
In addition to lighting a fire under HUD, the groundbreaking generated a fresh round of media coverage. In early January, the New York Times sent a reporter down to check on the progress of the new town. A few weeks later, a crew from NBC’s Today show visited. Both reports were glowing, and McKissick was once again flooded with letters from Black transplants in the North. There was the middle-aged man from Pennsylvania who hoped to spend his golden years operating a ham radio station in Soul City, the young couple from Detroit who wanted to start a family in the new town, and the single mother from the Midwest who was planning to move south with her four-year-old son and two roommates. There was also a letter from Hattie Bell, a public school teacher in New York City whose twelve-year-old son, Laurence Fishburne, had recently made his television debut on the soap opera One Life to Live. Bell was intrigued by McKissick’s vision for Soul City and requested information on schools, housing, jobs, and health care.
While some people wrote letters, many came to see Soul City for themselves. During one four-month period in 1974, Soul City welcomed nearly five hundred visitors, most from the South and Northeast, but some from as far away as Colorado and California. To handle the traffic, the staff converted an old shed into a welcome center stocked with brochures, maps, and souvenirs. When visitors arrived, they were greeted by a staff member, who showed them a clip from the Today story, then led them on a tour of local landmarks—the red barn, the manor house, Kerr Lake, Warrenton. Two years earlier, that would have been the extent of the tour. But the infusion of cash from the bond sale had given Soul City the bustling quality of a movie set. Work crews were busy clearing the land, grading roads, and installing underground electrical wires and streetlights. In August, HealthCo opened a temporary facility in a double-wide trailer. In September, construction began on the regional water system. And in October, ground was finally broken on Soul Tech I, the first of many planned buildings in the A. Philip Randolph Industrial Park.
But the clearest sign of progress was the influx of people. By the middle of 1974, more than seventy employees were on site, most living in a trailer park down the road from the manor house. Whereas McKissick had previously relied on a bare-bones staff of mostly inexperienced friends and family members, he now had a large team of highly qualified professionals. It was led by Charles Allen, who had been hired as general manager of the Soul City Company. A native of Virginia with a master’s degree in urban planning from Columbia, Allen had moved to Soul City with his wife and three children after serving as director of development and planning in Gary, Indiana. He was joined by Donald Johnston, a former marketing executive at Montgomery Ward and General Electric, who was appointed director of industrial recruiting. With his silver hair, tailored suits, and contrasting collars, Johnston cut a distinguished figure amid the trailers and dusty roads of Soul City. The rest of the staff was equally impressive. George Williams, an air force veteran with a master’s degree in planning from UNC, replaced Harvey Gantt as chief architect. Martin Doherty, a former Duke basketball player, served as head of finance. And Stan Roman, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia Medical School, was hired as director of HealthCo. Like Johnston, Roman had an urbane manner that stood out in the rural atmosphere of Warren County. It didn’t help that he drove a Mercedes convertible. But Roman was unapologetic about his lifestyle or his appreciation for fine things. “Many of the people here have reverted to the life style that is peculiar to this area,” he told a reporter. “What is needed here is an infusion.”
McKissick with an architect’s rendering of Soul Tech I.
Although most of the staff was Black, about a quarter of the employees at Soul City were white, including Johnston, Doherty, and Dorothy Webb, who was hired as director of public affairs. A graduate of Vassar, Webb had received a master’s degree from New York University, then served briefly as publisher of CITY magazine in Washington, DC. But what she really wanted was to join the civil rights movement, so when a friend got a job at Soul City she begged him to help her find work there. He obliged, recommending her to Carey, who offered her the public affairs job after a phone interview. Webb accepted without ever stepping foot in Warren County and moved down a few weeks later. Like many of the young people who left comfortable lives in the North to join McKissick’s venture, she faced skepticism from relatives and friends back home. “My family thought I was crazy,” she said. “But you have to remember any young woman who graduated from college at that time was considered crazy.”
There were no trailers available when Webb arrived, so she spent the first three months at the Holiday Inn in Henderson. When a new shipment of mobile homes finally arrived, she moved into the trailer park with the rest of the staff. As a city dweller, Webb was often caught off guard by the hazards and peculiarities of country life. Once she was working in the red barn when a snake dropped from the ceiling and slithered down her blouse. Another time she was awakened in the morning by a violent rumbling that felt like an earthquake. When she ran outside, she realized it was just a herd of pigs rooting around under her trailer.
The staff could do nothing about pigs and snakes, but it did attempt to provide a sense of culture and community—transforming the second floor of the red barn into a library, establishing an Interfaith Committee to provide religious services, opening the manor house for dance classes taught by Charmaine McKissick, and publishing a monthly newspaper called the Soul City Sounder. Printed on a mimeograph machine, the paper carried updates on construction, profiles of staff and residents, personal interest stories, drawings, poetry, and humor.
The staff also put together a handbook to help newcomers adjust to life in the rural South. In addition to providing information about regional services, schools, and recreation, it translated local customs and idioms, explaining that “B-B-Q in North Carolina is chopped pork, not ribs,” that “chili dogs are buns with chili,” and that police cars used blue lights instead of red. And for those hailing from larger and less hospitable places, it noted that, in Warren County, “Everybody waves at everybody.”
* * *
FOR THE MOST part, Black and white residents got along well. After all, everyone who lived in Soul City was committed to the goal of racial equality. But there were occasional tensions. Some Black staffers didn’t like the fact that Carey’s children called them by their first names, believing it showed a lack of respect. Others resented the father’s influence with McKissick. Although Charles Allen had been h
ired as general manager, Carey was still McKissick’s closest friend and most trusted adviser. The two men sometimes took off in the middle of the afternoon, grabbed a six-pack of beer, and drove over to Kerr Lake. There, sitting on a picnic table in what had once been the colored section of the beach, they hashed out whatever problems were bothering them that day. They also talked candidly about their families and their personal lives. “I probably knew Floyd better than I knew anyone else in the world,” Carey recalled. When asked why they got along so well, he was uncertain at first. They believed in the same things, of course. And McKissick was outgoing and easy to talk to. But there was something more to it. “I think he trusted me,” Carey finally offered. “He didn’t have to keep any secrets. He didn’t have to worry about anything. He could be himself.”
It wasn’t just the staff that resented Carey’s relationship with the boss. McKissick’s family was also troubled by his influence. Although they didn’t doubt Carey’s heart or his intentions, they worried that he lacked the pedigree and qualifications for the job. While the McKissicks were well educated, with multiple degrees from prestigious universities, Carey had never graduated from college. And in their book, that was a major liability. “My mother was not exactly a fan of Gordon Carey,” Charmaine recalled. “She thought Floyd was just too nice to this white man that didn’t have the same credentials as everyone else.”
Not that Carey and McKissick got along perfectly. Like many Black leaders of the era, McKissick was sensitive about being controlled or upstaged by whites. Although he leaned heavily on Carey to run things at Soul City, he sometimes got angry when Carey departed from his instructions or contradicted him in front of others. He also bristled when white officials dealt with Carey instead of him. After all, he was the famous civil rights leader, not Carey. He was the one who had spoken at the March on Washington. He was the one who had appeared on Meet the Press and the cover of Newsweek. And he was the one who had secured the loan guarantee from HUD. So when members of the Warren County Commission or the Henderson city council addressed Carey as though he were in charge, it struck a nerve. A few times McKissick got so upset with Carey that he told him to pack his bags. But he always changed his mind the next morning, playing it off as though nothing had happened.
The two men were also different in important ways. Although McKissick could be warm and funny, telling tall tales and off-color jokes, his dominant trait was his intensity. He worked around the clock, had little patience for excuses and incompetence, and often lost his temper. Carey, though smart and committed, had a more whimsical approach to life. He referred to his list of things to do as his “FAT list,” after the Frog and Toad children’s story in which the hapless Toad makes a list of his planned activities only to promptly lose it. Jane Groom, who knew both men well, felt that their personalities complemented each other. “Gordon was the pillow,” she reflected. “Floyd was the hammer.” As for why Carey was more relaxed, Groom had an answer for that, too. “Floyd was the Black man,” she explained. “When it comes down to it at the end of the day, he was the man who felt the color of his skin. Gordon didn’t. That deep passion—the purple passion we felt within ourselves—Gordon’s was bluish, and Floyd’s was deep purple.”
While the residents of Soul City got to know each other, they also made friends in the community. Some local Blacks still eyed them warily, turned off by their northern accents, modern hair styles, and foreign cars (in addition to Roman’s Mercedes and Lew Myers’s Volkswagen Beetle, Carey drove a VW Karmann Ghia). But others welcomed the newcomers, inviting them to dinner, dropping by with fresh-caught fish, and offering them rides into Warrenton. A few, such as Lucille Jordan, even joined the staff. Responding to an ad for a secretary, Jordan showed up at the Soul City office and handed her application to Jane Groom. When Groom asked how fast she could type, Jordan responded, “How fast do you want me to type?” Then, remembering her manners, she apologized and explained that she badly needed the job. Groom overlooked her cheekiness (and, as it turned out, her slow typing) and offered her the job anyway.
Local whites also grew accustomed to their new neighbors. A. D. Evans, who ran a service station on Route 1, initially feared Soul City would be “a cancerous sore” on Warren County. “But I don’t feel like that now,” he told a reporter. “They’ve got some of the cream of the crop in there.” R. J. Collier, another store owner, took an equally sanguine view of the growing community. “The more people in the vicinity, the more business,” he said.
Of course, this being Klan country, racial hostility was still prevalent. Driving down an unfamiliar road one day, Groom saw a sign propped against an old shed, with the words “Ku Klux Klan meeting here tonight” scrawled in red paint. She wasn’t sure whether the sign was new or old, but she knew the Klan was active in the area. Not long before, she and a group of Soul City residents had attended a voter registration drive at the Snow Hill Baptist Church, just outside Warrenton. After a round of freedom songs and introductory remarks, they sat back to listen to the main speaker. Ten minutes into his address, he was handed a note by one of the organizers: threats had been made against the meeting. Groom felt someone grab her by the shoulder and say, “Jane, let’s go.” She didn’t need to be told twice. She ran to the parking lot, got into her car, and followed the others in a caravan back to Soul City. As they sped down the long, dark road, she thought of the many civil rights activists who had risked their lives traveling on lonely southern highways like this one, “and for the first time I had the palpable feeling of what they must have felt during those years—fear.”
And where there was fear, hatred was not far away. One day a reporter asked a white construction worker digging ditches at Soul City what he thought of the project. “Why I been for it all along,” the man responded, with a knowing glance at his buddies. “I think all the niggers should move in there and we could put a fence around it and let ’em stay there.”
* * *
AS THE WIFE of the developer, Evelyn McKissick was the matriarch of Soul City. It was a role that suited her well. Like her husband, she had been born and raised in Asheville. But whereas his family clung tenuously to the middle class, her family sat comfortably atop it, having made a tidy sum on rental houses. The family’s own house was perched on a hill above a tree-lined street. The McKissicks lived close by, but several rungs down the economic ladder. In fact, some members of Evelyn’s family thought McKissick wasn’t good enough for her. And although McKissick had plenty of drive himself, the status of his wife’s family made him even more determined to succeed. Their marriage had thus been dominated by Floyd’s career, with Evelyn playing the role of helpmate. When the family lived in Durham, she had provided beds for activists passing through town and bought extra gifts for visitors at Christmas. In Harlem, she had hosted parties for CORE staffers and employees of McKissick Enterprises. And in Soul City, she ran the preschool program in the manor house, entertained important visitors, and was elected head of the Sanitary District.
If Evelyn was the matriarch of Soul City, Jane Groom was everyone’s little sister. Just twenty-eight when she moved to Soul City, Groom was energetic and cheerful, with bright eyes and a thousand-watt smile. She worked a full day, then came home to fix dinner and play with her children. She also enrolled in evening classes at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, hoping to get the undergraduate degree she had always wanted.
Jane Groom (third from right) with other Soul City staffers.
But if life as a working woman and mother was fulfilling, Groom’s marriage to Jimmy was not. The problems the young couple experienced in Mount Vernon continued in Soul City, due mainly to Jimmy’s jealousy and violent outbursts. After one especially frightening incident, Groom’s brother Buddy drove down from New York to check on her. Confirming that she was safe, he took her by the hand and led her on a long walk around the property. “Jane, I can walk with you and talk with you, but I can’t solve your problems,” he told her. “You and only you can change
your life for the better.”
Not long after that, Groom’s older sister Jean moved to Soul City. Jean’s marriage was also falling apart, so she packed up her three daughters and left Mount Vernon. An experienced bookkeeper, Jean got a job at the Soul City Company and moved into a trailer next to her sister. There, she fell in love with Augustine Howard, a graduate of North Carolina A&T who had come to Soul City to start a nonprofit. Named Andamule (after the promise of “forty acres and a mule”), the organization was designed to help Black people grow, harvest, and market sustainable crops. Howard was a master farmer and fisherman, but he also worked as a handyman and unofficial security guard, patrolling the grounds in his pickup truck to make sure everyone was safe.
As new residents arrived, some early settlers departed. McKissick’s oldest daughter, Joycelyn, moved away in the fall of 1974. Her husband, Lew Myers, had entered the MBA program at UNC, so the couple rented an apartment in Durham. While Myers continued to work at Soul City, commuting two hours each day, Joycelyn gradually withdrew from her father’s dream. In truth, she had never been all that happy at Soul City. With no job or purpose there, she felt superfluous and lost. Besides, she preferred poetry to planning, big cities to small. After a year in Durham she moved to Washington, DC, and she and Myers eventually divorced.
Gordon Carey’s wife, Betye, also departed. Dissatisfied with the Warren County schools and tired of living in a trailer, she took their two young children and moved to Chapel Hill. Betye insisted she was leaving Soul City, not her husband, but the effect was the same, and they, too, soon divorced. For a while Carey lived in a trailer with Sam Tidmore, the retired football player, but it wasn’t long before he met someone else, a young woman named Karen Wilken with two young children of her own. They were married in the summer of 1974 under a big cedar tree in front of the manor house. Karen carried a bouquet of wildflowers gathered from the fields, and Carey’s father, who had flown in from California, performed the ceremony. It was the first wedding in Soul City, and it led to another first. The following January, the happy couple celebrated the arrival of their daughter Ramona—the first baby born in Soul City.