by Thomas Healy
For all that—and for everything he did to destroy Soul City—it’s easy to view Helms as a villain who deserves only contempt. But McKissick had a different view. Asked about Helms after the federal government pulled the plug on Soul City, McKissick was philosophical. “No one can afford the luxury of hating any man,” he responded. “I never did hate Senator Helms, who was made in the image of God. He makes me look around and think: study the devious devices of people. So thank God for Senator Helms.”
* * *
AT THE NEWS & Observer, Claude Sitton and Pat Stith continued their efforts to uncover government waste and misconduct. And their work finally received the recognition some thought they deserved. In 1983, Sitton won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his weekly column. Among the articles included in his submission was one blasting the “Dixie demagoguery” of Jesse Helms. Thirteen years later, after Sitton had retired, Stith was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a series on the environmental damage caused by North Carolina’s massive hog industry. I was a staff writer at the N&O at the time and knew Stith, although not well. To a young reporter still learning the ropes of daily journalism, he was a gruff and distant figure. But he was deeply respected in the newsroom, and the Pulitzer was seen as a long-overdue reward for a lifetime of hard work. By the time he retired, in 2008, he had become a legend among investigative reporters. According to the 2016 book Democracy’s Detectives, Stith’s reporting was responsible for the resignation of eighteen public officials, the firing or demotion of another nineteen, and the indictment of six. His work also led to the passage of thirty-one laws in North Carolina, the hiring of forty-six officials, and the transfer of millions of dollars. One story alone led to the recovery of $2.4 million when twelve thousand state workers were forced to repay the state because of an accounting error.
When I interviewed Stith for this book, he defended his work on Soul City. Although he acknowledged that his stories weren’t as clear as they could have been, he said he had done the best he could in light of the constraints he was operating under. “I did an honest job,” he said. “Could it have been better? Well, yeah, you give me another shot at any story I ever did, I’ll do better if I get a second shot at it. Can’t you do better on a second shot? That’s a given. But did I write a basically error-free story? Basically. And I say basically because I’m allowing for some errors somewhere, I just don’t know what they are. Yes, I did. Did somebody lay it all out for me? I guarantee you they did not. It was hunt and peck and find this and that and the other little scrap of a lead and go over and find that contract and whatever.”
When I suggested that there are errors of commission and errors of omission, Stith agreed. “I really think it’s possible to write a story … that contains no error but the story itself is untrue,” he said. But he dismissed the idea that his stories fit that description. He also said he was not bothered by the attacks on him for his stories about Soul City. “People could say anything to me, I didn’t care. They could say, ‘You work for a rag’ or ‘Your work’s no good.’ It’s like pouring water on a duck’s back. I didn’t care.”
* * *
AND THEN THERE is Soul City.
In the mid-1980s, a sportswear manufacturer moved a cut-and-sew operation into Soul Tech I, and the community’s population increased to around three hundred. But if McKissick feared that another developer would swoop in and capitalize on the groundwork he had laid for Soul City, he needn’t have worried. Many of the same obstacles he confronted in the 1970s—a lack of jobs and skilled workers, a mediocre school system, rural isolation—also thwarted later developers. In 1989, a group of investors bought a hundred acres of former Soul City land with the intention of building an industrial park that would provide 1,300 jobs and 85 single-family homes. But like McKissick, they were unable to attract industry, and the project never got off the ground.
Thus, for many years nothing much happened in Soul City. And then, something did. In 1994, the state of North Carolina announced plans to build a medium-security prison in Warren County, on land that had once belonged to Soul City. The prison would be located just off Soul City Boulevard and would house up to six hundred inmates. It wasn’t exactly what Soul City residents had hoped for, and many protested. Others were resigned. After all, a prison would provide jobs, which were still sorely needed in Warren County. So after overcoming limited resistance, the state moved forward with its plan, and in 1997, the Warren Correctional Institution opened for business.
The real blow came several years later. By this point, the sportswear company had closed its operation, and Soul Tech I sat vacant. This gave prison officials an idea. The building, which was just down the road from the prison, was ideal for a small manufacturing plant. And the state had been expanding its prison factories in an effort to raise revenue and provide work for inmates. So officials purchased Soul Tech I and converted it into a factory making janitorial supplies.
Now in operation for well over a decade, the Correction Enterprises Janitorial Products Plant has been a resounding success. I toured the plant in October 2015 with Karen Brown, the director of Correction Enterprises, and Forest Fesperman, the plant manager. They greeted me in a small cinder-block building just outside a barbed-wire fence, then led me through an interior courtyard shaded by trees. On the other side of the yard, we entered a reception area furnished with round Formica tables, black office chairs, and a wooden bookshelf displaying the products made inside—disinfectant, laundry detergent, tile and grout cleaner, and bars of soap imprinted with the Correction Enterprises logo: the figure of a person holding a star over the words “Not Just Making It Right. Making It Better.”
Inside the plant, Fesperman showed me the equipment and explained how it worked. The inmates worked steadily, if not briskly, bottling detergent, cutting bars of soap, bagging powder. The majority were Black, but about a quarter were white—roughly the same racial makeup as the Soul City staff. They watched us indifferently, though one older prisoner did approach and tell me his story: how he had been framed for murder and spent six years on death row before having his sentence reduced to life in prison. Fesperman listened quietly, with the expression of a man who has heard it all before. A textile chemist by training, he worked as a salesman for several years before helping to open the plant. He’s proud of the operation, and for good reason. It’s well run and gives inmates a sense of purpose. It also generates about $6.5 million in yearly revenue for the state. Of all the things that have come out of Soul City, Correction Enterprises may be the most successful.
Inmates working at the prison factory that used to be Soul Tech I.
But for those who remember what Soul Tech I once was and what it represented, the plant is like a wound. Even today, McKissick’s daughter Charmaine can’t bring herself to drive by it. In 2007, three years after her mother died, she moved into her parents’ house with her husband, Tyrone Melton. Both work in Durham (she as a professor of communications at North Carolina Central University, he as a director for the North Carolina Association of Educators) and make the hour-long drive several times a week. But Charmaine never enters Soul City through the main entrance, which would take her past the plant. Instead, she takes a longer route that winds past fields planted with soybeans. And when she gives directions to visitors, she sends them along the back route, too.
Not that the rest of Soul City is much to look at. The maintenance of Green Duke Village is managed by the Soul City Parks and Recreation Association, which is funded by homeowners’ dues. As more and more residents moved away during the 1980s and ’90s, there was less money to maintain the streets, the bike paths, the manor house, and the pool. The situation eventually became so dire that Warren County agreed to assume control of the Magnolia Ernest Recreation Complex. Local officials paid for needed repairs and opened it up to the entire county. The complex is now in good shape. On summer days, the water in the pool is blue and the nets on the tennis court are intact. But the rest of Soul
City is slowly crumbling. The streets have not been repaved in decades, the manor house is in desperate need of repair, and only a handful of streetlights work. What once looked like a scene out of the movie Brigadoon now resembles a ghost town. The Soul City monolith has been repeatedly defaced with spray paint, and a vandal once fired two bullets into the middle of the “o.” In the mid-2000s, a woman bought the property on which the monolith stood and announced her intention to destroy it. Sickened at the thought, Jane Groom and other residents pleaded with county officials to do something. Their pleas were heard: Warren County paid to move the monolith to the entrance of Green Duke, where it still stands.
One of the most demoralizing developments was the closure of HealthCo. Even after the federal government foreclosed on Soul City, HealthCo continued to operate for three decades, serving Warren, Vance, and surrounding counties. For many poor residents, it was the only viable form of health care, since transportation was free and costs were subsidized by the government. At one point, it had seven full-time doctors and two dentists, as well as a large staff of nurses and technicians. But in 2009, it was shut down amid an inquiry into mismanagement of funds. Once HealthCo closed, it seemed as if the last remaining part of Soul City had died.
* * *
ABOUT TWO HUNDRED people live in Soul City today. Many arrived after the federal government foreclosed in 1980 and know little about the community’s history, but there are still a handful of early residents. On a summer afternoon I meet with two of them—Jane Ball-Groom (as she is known now) and her cousin Voyette Perkins-Brown—along with a newer resident, Ihsan Abdin, in the multipurpose room of the Scott Mitchell Apartments. An affordable housing complex built in the late 1980s, Scott Mitchell consists of six one-story buildings huddled near the entrance to Green Duke Village. Most of the residents are elderly or disabled, and the multipurpose room resembles a nursing-home lounge, with linoleum floor, folding tables covered with plastic tablecloths, and a large television set.
We are joined by Ihsan’s four-year-old grandson, who sits quietly as we talk. At one point, Voyette reaches into her purse, and I hear a rattling sound that I assume to be a bottle of pills. Instead, she pulls out a Tic Tac container and offers it to the child. He takes a few and sucks on them for a while, then lays his head on the table, puts his fingers in his mouth, and sleeps soundly while we talk for an hour and a half.
Voyette tells me about moving to Soul City in 1974, after she and her husband divorced. She had been living in Yuma, Arizona, and when the movers arrived with her furniture, they looked around at the trailer park, then looked at her. “The truck driver said to me, ‘Ma’am, I have been in the moving business for twenty years and I have never interfered in a decision, but I have a question. You left Yuma and moved yourself and your son here. May I ask why?’” Voyette recalls. “And I asked myself that for the next ten years.”
But she grew to love Soul City. A medical technologist by training, she got a job counseling migrant workers in Henderson. And with the help of a Federal Housing Administration loan, she purchased a home in Green Duke Village, where she still lives. “For me, the dream has been fulfilled. I came here and I raised my son. I have a home—peace, contentment—that’s what everyone’s looking for.”
Ihsan came to Soul City in 1989, long after the government foreclosed. She knows some of its history, but not all, and she asks Jane to describe what Soul City was supposed to be like. Jane describes the villages, each with its own activity center and schools, the parks, the theaters, the stores. “It was going to be a beautiful place to live.”
After our conversation, I drive around Green Duke Village again. I have been here several times since my first trip and know it well, but I still make new discoveries on each visit. Today, I notice how the loop road rises and falls as it curves around the subdivision, like a slow-speed roller coaster. I also notice a cluster of red, yellow, and pink flowers growing beneath the Green Duke Village sign.
When I drive past the recreation complex, I see that it is open, so I park the car on the street and walk past the basketball courts, where a group of five children, all Black, are playing a game of pickup. At the pool, a middle-aged white man sits in the lifeguard chair under a royal-blue umbrella. Seated near him on the edge of the pool is a white teenager in a hot-pink bikini. They are listening to a portable radio, which is playing “Small Town,” John Mellencamp’s valentine to rural America. Nodding to the lifeguard, I continue down the sloping field toward the lake. As on my first trip, it is still overgrown and littered with trash, but it is easy to imagine how beautiful it must have looked when completed in 1977. There is a rumble overhead. I look up and see the white traces of an airplane streaking across the clear blue sky. Had history turned out differently, I think, that plane might have landed here, in Soul City, bringing executives, bankers, tourists, and prospective residents. Instead of a ghost town, Soul City might now be the booming city Bob Brown, James Holshouser, and many others once predicted it would become. And instead of writing about a lost dream, I might be documenting another great American success story, this one conceived and built by Floyd Bixler McKissick, no longer a Black boy in a white land but just a man, at home in his own country.
Ihsan Abdin tends the grass at the base of the Soul City monolith.
Because at bottom, I believe, that’s what McKissick wanted. Soul City, the March Against Fear, the sit-ins, the Journey of Reconciliation—each battle he fought was a response to a particular injustice and followed a particular logic. But all sprang from the same motivation and the same desire: to reverse the hierarchy of identity he had become aware of on the trolley all those years ago. Not Black first and American second, but American first, so that to live in a town named Soul City, to drive down a street named Liberation Road, to work in an industrial park named after A. Philip Randolph would be viewed not as separatist or defeatist or some “sociological sport,” but would be, in McKissick’s words, “just as American as apple pie.”
I return to the car and drive around a while longer. On my first trip to Soul City, I felt a pit in my stomach brought on by a mixture of sadness and pity. Now, as I leave Green Duke Village, passing the manor house and the monolith, I feel something different. The sadness is still there, but the pity has been replaced by admiration for McKissick and all who followed him to Soul City. I want better for them, but I don’t feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for those who lack the vision and courage they displayed in taking a chance, in pursuing their dream and refusing to accept falling short as a sign of failure.
I remember something Jane Ball-Groom said to me on that earlier trip. She had invited me into her home and offered me a bologna-and-cheese sandwich. Sitting in her colorful living room, painted mauve and decorated with books and paintings, I listened to her reminisce about all that had happened since that winter day in 1970 when she and her husband piled their five children into a compact car and drove ten hours to arrive in the middle of the night. She spoke with affection and pride about her role in building Soul City. “It’s not a mansion on the hill by a river,” she said. “But it’s a far cry from the projects. To me, it was a blessing.”
NOTES
The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
PROLOGUE: “COMES THE COLORED HOUR”
“I can just see ‘ole massa’ now”: James T. Wooten, “Integrated City Rising on an Old Plantation,” New York Times, July 25, 1972, 21.
lacked indoor toilets: US Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of Housing, Housing Characteristics for States, Cities, and Counties, vol. 1, North Carolina, part 35, “Structural, Plumbing, Equipment, and Financial Characteristics for Counties: 1970,” Table 60, issued August 1972, http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/38148036v1p35.zip.
lacked a high school diploma: US Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of the Popul
ation, vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population, North Carolina, part 35, “Educational and Family Characteristics for Counties: 1970,” Table 120, issued March 1973, http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1970a_nc.zip; Hank Burchard, “‘Soul City’ Stirs Its Future Neighbors,” Washington Post, January 26, 1969, 35.
“a Camelot built on racism”: “McKissick’s Camelot,” Roxboro Courier-Times (Roxboro, NC), reprinted in Warren Record (Warrenton, NC), February 6, 1969, 2.
“liberation through violent revolution”: Floyd B. McKissick, Three-Fifths of a Man (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 47.
“go get some bread”: McKissick Enterprises, “Floyd B. McKissick Announces a New Program for Economic Development,” press release, October 3, 1968, McKissick Papers, folder 5135; Floyd B. McKissick interview with Robert Wright, October 16, 1968, 22, Bunche Collection.
under surveillance by the FBI: Jack Anderson, “Black Activists Are FBI Targets,” Washington Post, May 16, 1972, B15.
stop “sucking the sugar tit”: Floyd B. McKissick, “The Theory of the Sugar Tit,” speech delivered June 10, 1972, personal papers of Charmaine McKissick-Melton, copy on file with author.