Floyd McKissick’s Soul City
1. The 1966 national convention bode ill for pluralism. Those attending heard Stokely Carmichael declare: “We don’t need White liberals…We have to make integration irrelevant.”
2. McKissick added that as long as Whites had “all the power and money” nothing would be accomplished.
3. In his opinion, nonviolence was “a dying philosophy” which had “outlived its usefulness.”
4. The only way to achieve meaningful change was to “take power.”
5. Despite warnings that an organization like CORE could not survive without White support, delegates eventually endorsed the Black Power slogan and discarded their longtime commitment to nonviolence.
6. Following these meetings, CORE became more explicitly separatist.
7. The word “multiracial” was dropped from the constitution in 1967 and, before long, the national director could be heard talking about Blacks living as a “nation within a nation.”
8. White members responded by fleeing to safer shores.
9. Floyd McKissick was not, however, a nihilist. He wasn’t even a very predictable “bourgeois” nationalist.
10. McKissick’s personal leanings were revealed in his innovative plans for Black independence through economic development.
11. Claiming neither to support not condemn capitalism, McKissick simply recognized the existing system as “a power fact of life.”
12. If Blacks were to share in the wealth of the nation, they had to become good entrepreneurs.
13. They had to establish Black-run enterprises “over every level of the capitalist structure” if they were to improve the trade imbalance which continued to plague the nation’s Black “colonies.”
14. With Black people controlling their own industries “from beginning to end,” Whites would be forced to invest in Black corporations if they were to reap any economic benefit from their relationship with Black America.
15. To these ends, McKissick sought to join Black economic development with social commitment to the Black community.
16. McKissick’s model for community development was “Soul City,” a completely new town to be created in Warren County, North Carolina, just south of the Virginia border.
17. It was here, in the ninety-eight-poorest of the state’s 100 counties, that Soul City would rise.
18. With the support of the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Chase Manhattan Bank, McKissick hoped to build a prosperous “free standing community…”
19. Although employing an integrated staff, Soul City would be conceived and managed by Blacks.
20.Industry and affordable housing, not campus-like clusters of expensive homes would be the developer’s first priority.
21.The emphasis was on “social gains and building something for minorities in the Black Belt,” not on “siphoning people’s income to put them into big houses.”
22.Projected over 20 years and an eventual 5,000 acres, Soul City was to become a community of 50,000 with an economic base of 18,000 industrial jobs.
23. McKissick saw Soul City as a grand experiment to prove the efficacy of Black Power and the value of Black capitalist economics.
24. Land in places such as Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant could be transferred to community corporations whose trustees would be elected by local residents.
25. Within one generation…this process of ever-expanding economic and political control could result in the creation of “two or three states that are Black led, Black controlled, and predominately Black populated.”
26. Then, with Black Power fully realized in at least a few…locales, Black American people would be able to exert unprecedented influence within the federal system.
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