Soul City

by Thomas Healy

  EPILOGUE

  Mixed Blessings

  In January 1983, the latest director of the New Communities Administration, Warren T. Lindquist, made an announcement. After fifteen years and the expenditure of $570 million, HUD was terminating the program. It had not been a successful experiment. Of the thirteen new towns approved for loan guarantees, the government had foreclosed on nine and left three more on the verge of bankruptcy. The details of each failure varied, but the broad outlines were the same: inadequate funds, halfhearted support from HUD, overly optimistic projections, and an economic climate that made large-scale real estate development a losing proposition. The lone survivor was The Woodlands, an exurb of Houston that had been launched by the oil magnate George P. Mitchell and received a $50 million loan guarantee from the federal government, the most of any new town and four times more than Soul City. Today, The Woodlands is a thriving municipality of 120,000 people, 88 percent of them white. No one thinks of it as separatist.

  Outside the HUD program, the new-towns movement fared better. In California, Irvine became the catalyst for staggering growth in Orange County, while on the East Coast, both Reston and Columbia realized their founders’ visions. In some ways, Columbia has become a version of what McKissick hoped Soul City would be: a thriving, racially diverse city with well-planned neighborhoods, good jobs, and a strong sense of community. But although diverse, Columbia is not a predominantly Black city. It has also struggled to achieve economic integration, with many of its poorer residents relegated to villages near the city center. And, of course, Columbia differs from McKissick’s dream in this crucial respect: it was the accomplishment not of Black men and women but of white.

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH THE FEDERAL government gave up on the new-towns concept, McKissick never did. After reaching his settlement with HUD, he continued to look for ways to salvage his dream. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in November 1980, McKissick briefly held out hope the new administration might revive the project. But McKissick no longer had the same connections in Washington he’d once had. His alliance with the Republican Party had frayed. And the party had changed. Once capacious enough to embrace liberals such as Nelson Rockefeller and Edward Brooke—politicians who believed in the power of government to improve people’s lives—it had been taken over by Jesse Helms and other conservatives whose primary goal was to cut taxes, shrink government, and end welfare, and who made no real attempt to attract minority voters. Some civil rights icons, such as Ralph Abernathy, did support Reagan, but Abernathy was labeled a “modern Judas” and a “senile turncoat” by Black critics. McKissick, who had once felt such wrath himself, wasn’t afraid of being called names. But he couldn’t bring himself to support the Republican Party anymore, especially since it wasn’t willing to support Soul City. So in the early 1980s, he switched his political affiliation again and rejoined the Democratic Party.

  When McKissick’s efforts to salvage Soul City faltered, he returned to his roots: practicing law. He rented a storefront office on Oxford’s Main Street, across from a Hardee’s fast-food restaurant. There, he took on the kind of unglamorous cases he had handled as a young lawyer: criminal defense, personal injury, and the occasional civil rights case. It was a steep fall for a man who had once marched arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr., socialized with James Baldwin and Muhammad Ali, and shared a box at the Kennedy Center with Richard Nixon. But McKissick needed money, and, like many other civil rights figures, he discovered that there was no longer much demand for leading marches and planning protests.

  McKissick also fulfilled a childhood vow: he became a preacher. It was the vocation he had planned to pursue before the back of a policeman’s glove pushed him into law. But he had never entirely abandoned the calling. In some ways, his career as a civil rights leader had been a type of ministry. Instead of giving sermons and presiding at Sunday services, he had delivered speeches and organized demonstrations. Soul City itself had been something of a spiritual quest. Whether or not one believed McKissick had chosen the name for religious reasons, the project had an undeniably devotional feel to it.

  What finally brought McKissick to the pulpit was his car accident in the spring of 1979. While waiting for the paramedics to pull him from the wreckage, he thought back over his life and recalled the promise he had made as a child. He also reflected on “the overwhelming power of God,” in whose hands his life rested. The paramedics worked on his body, but McKissick’s mind was elsewhere. “I was talking with God,” he said. “I was conscious and I was aware that they were working to get me out of there. But I was talking with God. God told me to preach for him.”

  It didn’t take long for McKissick to answer that call. In August 1979, while fighting with HUD over the future of Soul City, he delivered a trial sermon at Union Baptist Church in Durham. Titled “Should We Pay Taxes to Caesar, or Who Is Caesar Today?,” the sermon built on an argument McKissick had been making for years: in order to change the system, one must work within it. His audience, which included Durham’s Black elite, answered enthusiastically with shouts of “Amen,” “All right,” “Go ahead and preach,” and “Tell it like it is.” Encouraged by their response, McKissick enrolled in divinity school at Shaw University in Raleigh, and when he completed his studies he began preaching at the First Baptist Church of Soul City.

  Those who saw McKissick during the 1980s describe him as weary and diminished. He was too proud to complain about his situation, too dignified to ask for help. But his confidence was shaken. “He was never quite the same after that,” recalled Bob Brown. “He lost a lot of his fire.”

  Not all of it, though. In 1982, McKissick roused himself to lead one more protest against the forces of discrimination and oppression. The state of North Carolina had announced plans to dump soil contaminated with cancer-causing PCBs in Shocco, an African American township in Warren County. Officials made the decision without consulting the community, and local residents believed they were being discriminated against because of their race. So they fought back, with McKissick leading the way. As trucks loaded with toxic waste rumbled down the road, protesters lay on the pavement, blocking their path. More than thirty demonstrators were arrested, including the sixty-year-old McKissick. Dressed in a suit and employing the tactics of nonviolent resistance he had helped pioneer, he let his body go limp as highway patrolmen carried him to a waiting bus and charged him with impeding traffic. It was the last of many times in his life he went to jail for the sake of the cause.

  Five years later, in an oral history interview, McKissick again showed flashes of his old passion and commitment. Asked whether he was ready to give up on Soul City and move elsewhere, he responded defiantly. “I will never leave, period, because I believe in the concept. I see it taking root, and the new-town concept is a valid concept notwithstanding what anyone says.”

  Two years after that, he gave his last speech, a graduation address at his alma mater, North Carolina Central’s law school. Like most of his speeches, a copy of this one was stored in a cardboard box in his garage in Soul City. More than twenty years later, his daughter Charmaine began the process of organizing the papers. As she went through the box, she noticed a curious thing. McKissick’s final speech bore the same title as the first one he had given, almost four decades earlier: “Am I My Brother’s Keeper?” Many years had passed, and much had changed, both in the country and in McKissick’s life. Yet he was still asking the same question he had asked as a young man and still arriving at the same answer. “Yes,” he concluded. “I am my brother’s keeper.”

  But McKissick’s time was running short. His lifelong cigarette habit had taken its toll. For several years, his throat had been raw, his voice rough. He ignored it for as long as he could, sucking on lemons to soothe the pain. Eventually he could ignore it no longer. In 1989, he went to a doctor and received the diagnosis he knew was coming: lung cancer.

  A few months later, McKissick was appointed to the North Carolina District Court by th
e state’s newest Republican governor, James G. Martin. He was the first Black judge to serve in the Ninth Judicial District, a four-county area encompassing Warren County. The appointment was a kind of redemption for McKissick, who had faded from the public eye, and it energized him. He had once believed that the most effective route to social justice ran through the law, and as a young civil rights leader he had placed much of his hope for change in the power of the Supreme Court. But he believed even more in the power of trial courts. These were the courts poor people were most likely to find themselves in, since they rarely had the money to appeal to a higher tribunal. “If America is to save itself, it must do so through a legal system that is designed to aid Black Men and poor men and represent their interests,” he had written in Three-Fifths of a Man. “Unbiased legalism is the way to mediate between men. We need dedicated social engineers to point the way.”

  McKissick was not able to fulfill that role himself. By the time of his appointment, his health was failing, and when he took his seat on the bench for the first time, he did so with the aid of an oxygen tank. His tenure on the court was short-lived. He heard his last case in early 1991, and on April 28, only ten months after taking his seat, he died at his Soul City home. His final days were difficult. He struggled to breathe and came to loathe the taste of Ensure, the only nourishment he could consume. But there was a certain peace to his death. It came one evening after dinner. He sat in his favorite chair in front of a large picture window. Outside, he could see the rolling hills, the fields and forests he had fallen in love with more than two decades earlier. They were still there, waiting to be developed, waiting for his dream to become reality. Charmaine watched from across the room. “He took a deep breath, and that was it.”

  McKissick’s death was widely reported. The New York Times described him as a “civil rights maverick,” while the Washington Post quoted Jesse Jackson’s assessment that McKissick was “one of the giants of the civil rights struggle.” He was buried in Soul City, near the entrance to his home. The funeral, which was held at Union Baptist Church in Durham, was presided over by Benjamin Chavis, now the most prominent civil rights leader in the state. There were tributes from James Farmer, Jesse Jackson, and Bob Brown. Shirley Caesar sang. Selections were read from the Book of Isaiah and 2 Timothy. Printed inside the program was the poem “Invictus” by the nineteenth-century British writer William Ernest Henley. A tribute to stoicism in the face of suffering, the poem is best known for the line “My head is bloody, but unbowed.” But for those mourning McKissick, the last stanza was most poignant:

  It matters not how strait the gate

  How charged with punishments the scroll

  I am the Master of My Fate

  I am the Captain of My Soul.

  * * *

  AMONG THE MOURNERS at McKissick’s funeral was Gordon Carey. After leaving Soul City, Carey had gradually put his life back together, working first as a consultant, then starting his own software development company. In the 1980s, he and Karen had moved from Raleigh to Winston-Salem, where she became a partner at a prominent law firm. Carey was happy and content, raising five children from two marriages. But he missed his old friend. When I asked him, years later, whether he had seen McKissick in the years before his death, he looked away and grew distant, as though he were lost. “No, I didn’t,” he finally said. “I didn’t really.” During my many interviews with Carey, he was forthcoming about nearly every aspect of his life. He relished talking about Soul City and was proud of his involvement with it. He had always wanted to live an interesting life, he told me, and felt he had done so. But whenever I asked about his falling-out with McKissick, he became evasive, as though it was one of the most painful memories of his life—too painful to regard with his usual detachment. I noticed something else during the course of our many interactions. When I first communicated with Carey by email, in 2014, the quote beneath his signature line read, “Enjoy life—it is too short to be taken seriously!” It was typical of Carey, who is quick to find humor in even the most difficult circumstances. But at some point during our conversations, he replaced that quote with a more somber one. His emails now ended with William Faulkner’s famous line about the timeless nature of history: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

  Carey wasn’t the only one deeply affected by his time at Soul City. Although the town never became the engine for economic growth McKissick envisioned, it did provide training for Black professionals, many of whom went on to distinguished careers. One of the most prominent was Eva Clayton, who in 1992 was elected to the US House of Representatives, becoming the first African American to represent North Carolina since Reconstruction. Clayton served five terms in the House, providing crucial leadership on the problems facing rural America. After declining to run for reelection in 2002, she was appointed assistant director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, a division of the United Nations dedicated to ending hunger around the world.

  Floyd Jr. also entered politics, serving in the North Carolina Senate for thirteen years. As chairman of the legislative Black caucus, he was a strong voice for voting rights, health care, and criminal justice reform. He moved away from Soul City decades ago but remains proud of the work he did there and shares his father’s sense of hope and idealism. On the wall of his Durham office hangs a quote that would have fit in perfectly at McKissick Enterprises: “Never laugh at anyone’s dream. People who don’t dream don’t have much.”

  Probably the most famous alumnus of Soul City is Harvey Gantt, the young architect who created the master plan for the town. In 1983, he became the first Black mayor of Charlotte, serving consecutive two-year terms. Smart and charismatic, Gantt was considered a rising star in the Democratic Party, someone who might one day run for national office. So in 1990, the party nominated him for a seat in the United States Senate. His opponent in the general election: Jesse Helms.

  Since the fall of Soul City, Helms’s profile had only increased. He was a key player in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory and had established himself as a leader of the modern Republican Party. In fact, it is fair to say that Helms, with his focus on deregulation and his cultural conservatism, paved the way for Reaganism, which in turn gave rise to the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus. Throughout the 1980s, Helms had also burnished his foreign policy credentials, taking hard-line positions on communism and nuclear deterrence. And he had reaffirmed his hostility to minority interests, leading a sixteen-day filibuster in opposition to the creation of Martin Luther King Day. His rise had not gone unchallenged. In the 1984 campaign, he battled Democrat James Hunt, a popular former governor, a race Helms won by a slim four-point margin. Now he faced another tough test against Gantt, a dynamic African American who had run the state’s largest city.

  Having been on opposite sides of the Soul City battle, the two men found themselves locked in a vicious contest. It was one of the most expensive campaigns in Senate history and was watched closely for its national implications. Many observers thought a Gantt victory might signal a weakening of the Republican stranglehold on the South, and for a while it looked as though he might win, with polls showing a race too tight to call. But in the last weeks of the campaign, Helms returned to the kind of race-baiting he had employed on behalf of Willis Smith in 1950. In one ad, he suggested that Gantt had gotten rich at taxpayer expense while working as a planner at Soul City. Another ad showed the hands of a white man crumpling a rejection letter while a narrator explained that the job he applied for had been given to a less qualified minority. “Is that really fair?” the narrator asked. “Harvey Gantt says it is.” The ads were blatant appeals to racial resentment. And they worked. When the results came in, Helms won, 53 percent to 47 percent. Six years later, the two men squared off once more, and again Helms prevailed, 54 percent to 46 percent.

  After that campaign, Gantt retired from politics and returned to his architectural practice in Charlotte. But he continued to think about what makes a city vibran
t and successful. And every so often, while driving his car or working at his desk, he would think back to his days in Soul City and marvel at the boldness of McKissick’s vision. “How audacious was that?” Gantt reflected when I interviewed him in his downtown office. “To think that we could build a city in rural America, in the heart of one of the poorest sections of North Carolina, that we could attract people who were previously farmers and domestic workers and bring in factories and the kinds of jobs that would pay decent wages and see a lifting of their quality of life and economic circumstances … There are a lot of days I’ve sat and wondered, ‘Why did I think that was going to succeed?’”

  But Gantt believes Soul City could have succeeded, if not for the timidity of industry, the foot-dragging of HUD, the opposition of Helms and the News & Observer, and the economic downturn of the 1970s. “There was an opportunity there. There really was an opportunity. He just needed some more help, and not just federal government help. He needed some more risk-taking developers.” And if Soul City had succeeded, what would it have meant? Gantt paused to consider. It might have changed the history of race relations over the past half century, he said, expanding the country’s focus beyond civil rights to the even more challenging issue of economic equality. “Had it been successful and we’d seen Black capitalism really at work in a thriving, growing entity, not just somebody who’s a great entertainer, a great athlete, but a group of people who were instrumental in developing a really viable city that attracted both Blacks and whites, I think it would have done wonders for the psyche of Black Americans and Americans in general, and that model would have been replicated in other counties across the country.”

  While Gantt retired from politics, Helms served another term in the Senate, continuing to push far-right policies. He helped to tighten trade sanctions against Cuba, railed against federal funding for controversial art, and opposed government spending on AIDS research (a position he later reversed). He also added to his reputation for cruelty and bigotry. Finding himself in an elevator one day with Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman elected to the Senate, Helms told his white colleague Orrin Hatch, “Watch me make her cry” before whistling “Dixie.” He held up the confirmation of a HUD official because, as he put it, “she’s a damn lesbian.” And when Bill Clinton advocated that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms warned that if the president visited North Carolina he “better have a bodyguard.”