99% Invisible - 207- Soul City

Episode Date: April 6, 2016

In the late 1960s, a civil rights leader named Floyd B. McKissick, at one time the head of CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality) proposed an idea for a new town.  He would call this town Soul City and it would be … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the 1960s, American cities were in crisis. Infrastructure was crumbling. Traffic and pollution were terrible. Crime was up. Cities weren't particularly nice places to live. White people were able to flee urban centers for the suburbs thanks to federal help with mortgages and new freeway development. That process would come to be known as White Flight. Meanwhile, black populations in cities were dealing with housing discrimination and police brutality. Riots were breaking out in cities all over the country, and this awful time was referred

to by scholars as the urban crisis. That's our own Katie Mingo. And the civil rights movement was happening in parallel to the urban crisis, but it wasn't really addressing the problems for black people in cities. The overarching question was, can the cities be saved? How can we make urban life better for people, for all people? That's Roger Biles, professor of history at Illinois State University.

And, you know, there were some folks who looked at the situation and just threw up their hands and said, you know, we just can't salvage what's here. The answer is starting over again. In other words, urban planners thought maybe the problems facing cities were too big and too complicated to fix. And it's within this context of the urban crisis and the civil rights movement that the federal government would come to consider an idea like Seoul City. Floyd McKissick offered an idea today, a new city to be built in the country in North Carolina to be called Seoul City and to be populated mainly

or entirely by Negroes he says would move there from the ghettos. This tape is from a 1969 NBC National News broadcast and this new city was being proposed by a civil rights leader named Floyd McKissick. In establishing our new city in North Carolina, we will create new jobs and new careers for black people. As a response to the urban crisis, the federal government had announced plans to provide financing to about a dozen brand new towns and Floyd McKissick wanted Seoul City to be one of them.

In this new town, persons will be able to control their own destinies. We have the power to actually be a part of building a town. Come on, it's the story of America. And to be a part of it. That's Jane Ballgroom. She was working as a secretary from a chisic in Harlem when he first started developing the idea for Soul City, which would be a place built for and by black people, a land of black opportunity in rural North Carolina.

Jane says going to Soul City was like being a pilgrim. You know, we had our own Mayflower ship, we came down in cars. You know, it was the same dog I'm saying. But, you know, maybe not so, the children's had a really hard. The pilgrims did have it really hard, but this wouldn't be easy either. The government would eventually come to support this project, but there would be politics and compromises and very strange bedfellows. And that was all before breaking ground on Soul City. When Floyd McKissick first pitched the idea of an all-black town, there was one

question he got asked a lot. There's a building in a city like this, four-mpire of the trend towards separatism. This is a reporter at an early press conference and a lot of people were curious about this. With Soul City a departure from the idea that black people and white people should integrate together in society? Was this instead black people starting their own thing separate from white people? And you can hear mccasics struggle to answer. Now I think it does the same thing as the Chinese have done in New York. They built them Chinese area, Chinatown.

It's a beautiful section of the city that I admire. To understand all the ways that this question about separatism was relevant, you have to understand a bit about who Floyd McKissick was. This photograph here would kill my father, I'm the left here hand in hand with Dr. King. This is Floyd McKissick the second. He's a lawyer and a state senator and he's showing me pictures of his dad that are hanging in his office in Durham, North Carolina. Three of the famous Mark and Washington, where Dr. King gave his eye at a dream speech.

My father and Dr. King led that mark that day. A few years after that march, Floyd McKissick's senior would become the executive director of an organization called CORE. That's the Congress on racial equality. And he was part of a handful of really important civil rights leaders in the 60s, along with people like Dr. King, Roy Wilkins, and Anna Blacepie, Whitney Young of the Urban League, and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC.

SNCC being the student nonviolent coordinating committee. Because of these leaders and the members of their organizations, huge legal gains were made in civil rights and integration in the 50s and 60s. And then in 1966 there's this kind of pivotal moment in the movement. A civil rights activist named James Meredith is shot by a white gunman while leading a march in Mississippi. Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick both go down in Mississippi to continue the march. Carmichael is arrested and when he gets out of jail he makes a speech where he says, don't be afraid, don't be ashamed, we want black power. We want black power.

We want black power. We want black power. We have stayed here and we beg the president. We beg the federal government. That's all we've been doing, begging, begging. It's time we stand up and take over. On that day in 1966, the president was going to be the president.

He was going to be the president. He was going to be the president, we beg the federal government. That's all we've been doing, begging, begging, is time we stand up and take over. On that day in 1966, the Black Power Movement was born. And the mechistic of core and Carmichael of SNCC become two of the most vocal advocates of this new movement. What do we need, Black Power? When do we need it now? Stoking my dad were probably the two

leaders in articulating what that meant. For Carmichael and McKissick, black power was a step further than civil rights and integration. It was essentially the idea that black people should control their own communities, should have proportional representation in government. Again, Stokely Carmichael in 1966. We have to do what every group in this country did. We got to take over the communities where we outnumber people so we can have decent jobs. So we can have decent houses. So we can have decent roads.

So we can have decent schools. So we can have decent justice. So we can have decent justice. So, McKissick and Carmichael both very much believed in the idea of black power. But in the late 60s, they began to diverge about how to achieve it. Carmichael and many others in the black power movement thought that capitalism was an inherently exploitative system that would always leave someone at the bottom. On the other hand, McKissick began to believe that capitalism was the answer. McKissick actually associates himself with a very important tendency in black power.

That Sundiara Chajua, professor of history and African American studies at the University of Illinois or Banna Champaign, and the tendency he's talking about is one toward black capitalism. What it means, essentially, is that black people should own and control their own capitalist enterprises, and it comes to suggest that business ownership is to path to equality, freedom, justice, social transformation. Too long ago we attempted to divide economics from politics. The question that becomes paramount in say 1970 is a strategy not principle. That's Floyd McKissick, an archival interview with political writer Walter DeVries. We see the subject is becoming intensely pragmatic to us. Absolutely. Absolutely.

As you've got it with the ideological and the ideological. You don't have to call it pragmatic. You might lose everything that you've gained, all those gains that you've made during the 60s. McKissick believed that the time for idealism was over. It was time for black people to claim their piece of the American pie. Now where the hell are you and what the where, what are you going to do to become a fool fled America? Do you want to go back to Africa? I for one believe I will stay here. Actually, Stokely Carmichael did go to Africa.

Leaving behind the black Power movement in America, he moved to Guinea, where he dedicated himself to the all African People's Revolutionary Party. And Floyd McKissick did indeed stay in the States. He resigned from core to start a four-profit company called McKissick Enterprises, and set his sights on building Seoul City. The town he hoped would create as much economic opportunity for black Americans as possible.

And we can bring together, you know, the private sector. You can bring together industry government and educational resources to really build a town free of racism. the town free of racism. The building of black towns is an expression of a desire for autonomy. McKissick's soul city wasn't a first for black town building in the US. Quite a few towns were settled in the great plains between 1890 and 1910 by African-American sharecroppers fleeing the south, but these weren't intentionally planned communities with government support. Amazingly in the late 1960s, just as McKissick becomes convinced that building a new town

is the way to achieve black power, the government struggling to deal with the so-called urban crisis announces their program to help finance several new cities as part of the Urban Growth and new Communities Act. The legislation was passed, which provided a process for building these things. That's historian Roger Biles again, and he says these new cities would be meticulously planned in order to avoid the problems of existing cities. We're going to bring all of the knowledge and all of the insights of urban planning to doing it right this time. The program would be managed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, also known as HUD. Private developers could propose ideas to HUD for new towns. If they were approved, the new towns could sell government-backed bonds to investors on Wall Street.

And as McKissick starts talking to people within HUD about this all-black town idea, they're like, look, there's no way we're going to approve something that's perceived as being separatist. So McKissick dials back the language he was using to describe Seoul City. If you look at the things that he wrote and said before he feels out to actual applications, right, it's all about, you know, he's talking about building ideal black communities.

After he's gone through that process, then the literature is about building middle class communities that are open. McKissick never envisioned a place where white people would be specifically excluded. He did imagine a majority black town with a majority black leadership, but he couldn't really talk about it like that. In politics, concessions must be made. The next big one would come in the form of an important ally.

Mckissick understood that to be approved to build one of these new cities, he'd need friends in high places. He first pitches the idea to the current president, Lyndon Johnson. And Johnson seems interested, but then he decides not to run for re-election. And so, in 1968, Mckissick looks at the new field of presidential candidates and asks himself, who is the most viable person to support the Seoul City Project? That's Devon Fergis. He's a professor of African American Studies at Ohio State University.

He opts for Richard Nixon. We've had enough of big promises and little action. The time has come for honest government in the United States of America. And it's chocolately. Nixon actually supports this project. Nixon believed in black capitalism because Nixon believed in capitalism. He believed that when people owned property and businesses, they had more of a stake in the country. Apart from that, the Republican Party wanted to bring in black voters. In Republican Party in the late 60s and 70s was a much more big tinted sort of party.

The way to win and a way to create a doorbell to Republican party, is by casting as wide as net is possible. It's unclear how much Nixon's support helped McKesics cause since the final decision was made by an agency within HUD. But in the early 1970s, Seoul City did become one of the 13 new towns to receive government backing. And Floyd McKesic, Black Power Leader, became a Republican, and one of Nixon's most vocal black supporters. Of the 13 new cities, Seoul City was the only so-called free-standing new city.

Meaning, it wasn't being built right next to an already existing city that it could lean on for employment opportunities and infrastructure. It was being built on an old tobacco plantation, about an hour away from Durham in rural Warren County, North Carolina. We were partying ears. We really were partying ears because you have to know what this place looked like. It was a farm, it was the green-due plantation. Well, it was in high form. There were only 59 slaves there.

That's Jane Ballgroom. You heard her at the beginning of the story and Doris Terry Williams. I interviewed them together in Jane's house in Warren County. In 1970, Jane packed up her family and left her crowded housing project in New York for the wide open farmlands of North Carolina. For me, coming out of New York was land! It was land! It was safe! When Jane got to Warren County, there were just a handful of other new settlers living in trailers.

These early planners had developed a 30-year strategy for Solciti that laid out everything, including their plan for three residential villages with mixed income housing. Floyd McKinseyck II actually got a degree in urban planning to help his dad design Solciti. The design was inspired by the plan community of Columbia, Maryland, which was meant to have racial diversity and a small town feel. Solciti had acquired 3 3600 acres of land. They hoped to have a population of about 2000 people by 1978 and by the end of 30 years they wanted to be up to around 40,000 people. Jane says these early days at

Sol City just felt full of potential. Growing up in America even in New York, you know you have limitations because you were Negro. You have to understand that. You can't understand that. You've got my point and then you hear you get all of this. Oh my God! It's a miracle. It was to me it was just an amazing time to be young, gifted in black. Floyd McKissick continued to support the Republican Party, and he spent some time traveling and campaigning for Nixon when he ran for his second term as president. But most of McKissick's time was spent at Seoul City.

When he was here, he was in the middle of the community. He was never a part of above. You know, I didn't have his education, I didn't have his stature, but he was my brother. Yeah. McKissick had decided on Warren County because he grown up in North Carolina, so we knew the state. But also because black residents had left the South in droves during the great migration to cities of the North,

he wanted to give urban blacks a place in the South to return to if they wanted, and give people who were already there a reason to stay. In order to create jobs, McKissick's hope was to attract industry. He wanted a big company, like General Motors, to come down and build a factory. But before that could happen, Sol City needed basic infrastructure, like water and electric. Sol City built an electrical grid

and partnered with a few other counties to build a huge regional water system from a nearby lake. Between 74 and 76, there was this growth. I'd wake up in the morning, I'd hear bulldozers outside, I'd see the trucks coming in, digging up the bread and mud, putting down concrete. I saw this every day, you smelled it, it was just so fantastic.

So many things were... They built a health clinic called HealthCo in a public swimming pool, both of which brought people from all over the county. The roads, all the roads, all the roads, the house, the infrastructure. And they built a huge 60,000 square foot industrial building divided into separate sections with loading docks called Soul Tech 1. Soul Tech 1 completed in 1975 was designed by architect Harvey Gantt and it was meant to be an incubator where a new industry could get started and then move to bigger facilities if need be.

But despite there being moments where it felt like real growth was happening, Seoul City was not hitting its targets. By the mid-1970s, the population was fewer than 200 people. A few small manufacturers set up in the Seoul Tech building, but no one that could offer a substantial number of jobs. Without enough residence, it was hard to attract industry, and without the industry, it was hard to attract new residents. And then there was the problem of the name.

And then the name, Soul City. I mean, there were people who said you should change the name of the project and though, you know, Floyd just refused to do that. It was really terrific. It's biblical. You had a soul. We had three souls on my soul first. It was a time to receive the name as being to black. To black. Soul City was not an all-black town. In fact, Gordon Carey, who played an important role in the leadership, was white, and some

of the residents were white. But it could never really escape the perception of being an all-black town. And in some ways, it never really wanted to. So many people over the years have said, oh, you know, why was it all black? I've gotten old enough to say now. Why not? It was a multiracial community, it always was. But don't go on it.

After all the years that we've been through, and I'm like, my history, why not? Apart from Soul City's identity issues, McKisix ally in the White House, President Nixon, had resigned in disgrace, and the economy was in a slump. On top of that, the Raleigh News Observer launched an expose on Sol City. 17 negative articles over eight days accusing Sol City of all kinds of wrongdoing, political payoffs, cronism, nepotism, and financial misappropriation.

And then, with this expose as rationale, came North Carolina's senator, Jesse Helms, ready to battle with Soul City. Here's Floyd McKissick the second again. Helms launched attacks against Soul City that literally brought development to a halt. During his long tenure as a Republican senator in North Carolina, Jesse Helms gained the reputation of being a not-so-secret racist, and he disliked the Sol City project from the beginning. Remember, McKissick and Helms were in the same political party.

Still, Helms was determined to destroy McKissick's city. Senator Helms ordered a fiscal audit on Sol City, and HUD froze funding until the audit was over. They never found any wrongdoing. The audit gave us a clean bill of health, but it damaged us significantly in terms of public perceptions. It's true most of the charges leveled against Seoul City by Helms or the Rally News and Observer were not substantiated during the audit, But the bad press had further scared away industry and investors.

Growth in Seoul City was at a standstill. And after a certain point, again, historian Roger Biles. Bankers and HUD simply withdrew to the position that, well, we're not going to advance you any more loans. We're not going to invest in this anymore until we see some growth. And McKissicks come back, well, you know, we've reached a point where the growth isn't going to come unless we have more investment. This business didn't come, that business didn't come. Things were not looking great. But in my mind being the optimist that I am a civil, but it's going to happen, it's going to be okay. Ten years ago Floyd McKissick, a civil rights activist, set out to build a city for blacks.

McKissick said that in 30 years it would be home to 46,000 people. But today, Seoul City is a broken dream and the government has begun for closure action to seize the property. In 1979, HUD announced that they would no longer support Sol City. Without the government support, McKissick was forced into foreclosure, and most of the land at Sol City was sold off. But of the 13 towns developed as part of the Urban Growth and New Communities Act, Sol City wasn't the only one to fail. Only one of them actually thrived and that was a place called the Woodlands, which is just north of Houston.

The Woodlands was more generously subsidized from the beginning and had the benefit of being on the outskirts of Houston, Texas during an oil boom. The other 12 towns all failed, meaning people might still live there, but they did not continue on autonomously. Some became suburbs or neighborhoods of bigger towns, some remained unincorporated. Most of the failed towns cited a lack of investment as the primary reason for failure. But Sol City faced additional hurdles. For one, they were the only standalone town, so they were truly starting from nothing. And in that, it's that a strong dose of racism.

I think that might be the way you laugh when you actually want to scream. In any case, it's not hard to imagine that racism played a role in Sol City's demise. There was the investigation by Jesse Helms, the negative press, and the government Floyd Jr. says was always looking over their shoulder. We were always under a special level of scrutiny, and a special level of review. You're gonna make the right turn at that yellow sign down there.

That was the main entrance to Soul City. I'm going to make the right turn at that yellow sign down there. That was the main entrance to Sol City. I'm driving around with Doris Terri Williams in what was once Sol City. It's now an unincorporated part of Warren County. This little strip right here was built as the beginning of kind of a commercial place. There were several little businesses in there. It still feels like a really rural area. There's a pond and some woods,

a few clusters of houses. Some of the buildings are abandoned, like the health clinic. And this building here on your left, this was health co. Health co. And then we get to a new building, a big one. One that was built after the Soul City project failed. And this is the prison. In 1993, the Warren County Correctional Facility was built. It's a high-security prison designed to house about 800 inmates. And next door to the prison, and the building that used to be Soltech 1, is now Correction

Enterprises. Soltech 1, remember, was the building designed to incubate new industry in Sol City. At Correction Enterprises, prison laborers make genitorial products like soap and earn about three dollars a day. All of this on the former slave plantation that Floyd McKisic tried to transform into a place for black people to succeed. It's not hard to see the tragic irony in this. Back at Jane's house, I asked her and Doris how they felt when the prison came. I lost my freaking mind, I'm her and Doris how they felt when the prison came. I lost my freaking mind. I'm beginning to say she...

And they could have brought industry here, real industry. Yeah, why not? Instead of that prison. Bringing a prison because most of the men with black prisons are black. It happens all over rural America, particularly low income and communities of color, but the promise that is going to bring jobs. It is an insult, is an insult to Floyd's memory, is an insult to all the things that he was trying to do here. Floyd McKissick passed away in 1991, so he didn't live to see this final insult to his city.

Before he died, he served as a judge in North Carolina and as a pastor at the first Baptist Church of Seoul City. He found a way to continue the struggle. But Seoul City was a hard defeat to get over. This was his architecture. This was his fountain head. This was his, this was, it is, and it is his legacy. I mean, can you imagine? And I tell you, I saw a difference in him. He was just a different man. Something had been shaken away. He wouldn't tell you, but something had been shaken away.

It's funny, somehow I'd never heard of McKessick. I'd heard of a lot of his contemporaries in civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. of course Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. I'd also heard of a lot of his peers in the Black Power movement, people like Stokely Carmichael, Asada Shakur, Huey Newton and Angela Davis, but not Floyd McKissick. These younger scholars who do what's called Black Power Studies, they've tended to study and write about the organizations and the individuals whom they see as heroic. That's Professor Sundiata Chajua again.

Mckissick supports Richard M. Nixon and joins the Republican Party. Mckissick isn't seen as heroic, but that doesn't mean he's not important. Sundata thinks that even though Mckissick was not a conservative Republican, he's still a less appealing character to scholars who are interested in the more radical ideals generally associated with black power. So he gets written out of the history. Mckissick is fairly well known and loved in North Carolina. And Doris says Sol City has had far reaching impacts on the state.

Because do you think about the people who came through Sol City who have gone on to do just amazing thing? I was talking to Abdullah Rashid the other day. Doris and Jane go on to list several people who were influenced by McKissick and Soul City and went on to start social programs in the area or even be elected to public office. You know, Eva Clayton, all of the folk who came through. And people still live on the land that was Soul City, making use of the water and electrical

systems that were built as part of the project, driving on those roads, living in those houses. Jane Ballgroom still owns her home in Sol City. I mean, to me, Mackissac's dream was, you know, ownership of one's self and pride in one's self. To me, I realized the dream in my own, in my little capacity. And if scholars are writing Mackissac out of history because they don't see him as a hero, well, they're certainly not going to convince Doris Terry Williams or Jane Ball Grum. I mean, I remember walking around with that hat on, we had this cowboy hat or whatever you

want to call it, it was a beautiful hat. He was just not going to tell you. Jankrum? You okay, Jank? I'm okay, Mr. Macchiss. He cared about people. He was just not going to take a tan, dang room, okay? I'm okay, I'm just gonna say, okay. He cared about people, he knew they really cared about people. He was just, he wasn't perfect, but he was mag-nificent. Yeah.

Yeah. Don't give me that life. Come give me life, oh what a lovely precious dream To be young, give me life, open your heart to world like me 99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Mingle with Delaney Hall, Avery Trufflement, Kurt Colesstead, Sharif Usef, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Megan Reed. The archival tape you heard of Floyd McKissick came from the Southern Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxivine, an architecture in interior's firm. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, you can follow us all on Twitter and Instagram, but the best way to explore the 99% invisible activity that shapes the design of our world is to spend as much time as possible on 99pi.org. Radio tapio.

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