28 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
communities, sometimes known as
“new towns,” such as Reston, Virginia,
founded in 1964, and Columbia, Mary-
land, founded in 1967. And there was a
continuing determination to transform
the so-called “ghettos”—neighborhoods
that were widely thought to be not just
a reflection of Black poverty but a cause
of it. McKissick proposed to rescue
Black people from the economic stasis
of ghettos by creating a new
town designed by and for
Black people. Whenever he
was challenged, as he often
was, McKissick stipulated
that his community would
be “open to all races.” But
the name Soul City re-
flected the Black identity
that was, for McKissick,
one of its most important
selling points. He was a
stern and effective presence on television,
with a skeptical squint and a crooked
smile that could be even more skepti-
cal than the squint. During one of his
innumerable media appearances, he
promised that Soul City would be “a
place where Black people can come,
and know they’re wanted.”
The appeal of Soul City was a chance
to start anew. McKissick didn’t see the
community as an extension of the long
history of Black settlements in Amer-
ica; the whole idea was to build some-
thing where just about nothing existed,
so as not to be influenced by whatever
it was that made many Black neigh-
borhoods inimical to prosperity. Mc-
Kissick found a plot of eighteen hun-
dred acres of undeveloped land, available
for three hundred and ninety thousand
dollars—a good price, although it was
evidently about three hundred and
eighty-seven thousand dollars more
than McKissick Enterprises had on
hand. Chase Bank agreed to loan Mc-
Kissick half the purchase price, and the
seller agreed to accept it as a down pay-
ment. In late February, 1969, McKis-
sick closed the deal.
The story of Soul City has been
told a number of times over the years,
and few of the tellers have failed to
notice the central irony: McKissick’s
experiment in Black independence de-
pended on the benevolence of white
government officials. As McKissick was
launching his company, President Lyn-
don B. Johnson signed the Housing and
Urban Development Act of 1968, which
directed the government to finance “the
development of new communities.” By
the time McKissick bought his land,
a new President had been inaugurated,
and much of the history of Soul City
involves McKissick doggedly attempt-
ing to shake money loose from the
Nixon Administration. Dozens of con-
struction workers took up
residence in trailers on the
property, but prospective
employers weren’t eager to
move to Soul City with-
out prospective employees,
and vice versa. “Three years
of my life have gone into
this project,” McKissick
wrote, at one point, to a
sympathetic government
official. “I am sure my cred-
itors within the next ten days will be
on the attack unless McKissick Enter-
prises secures additional funds.” In his
effort to get free from white control,
and from political wrangling, McKis-
sick wound up more ensnarled in these
things than ever.T
he modern argument over Black
capitalism began much earlier. In
1895, a Black educator named Booker T.
Washington gave a speech in Atlanta
calling for Black people to embrace
life in the South, despite all its hard-
ships. “It is in the South that the Negro
is given a man’s chance in the com-
mercial world,” Washington said. He
promised his Black listeners that they
could prosper through hard work, and
promised white listeners that Black peo-
ple would not immediately demand full
rights or full integration. “In all things
that are purely social we can be as sep-
arate as the fingers,” Washington said,
“yet one as the hand in all things essen-
tial to mutual progress.” The speech
transformed Washington into a celeb-
rity, although plenty of Black leaders
disagreed with it, none more eloquently
than W.E.B. Du Bois, who gave the
speech a derisive nickname (“The At-
lanta Compromise”), and argued that
it was “utterly impossible, under mod-
ern competitive methods, for working-
men and property-owners to defend
their rights and exist without the right
of suffrage.” If Black people were to beeffective capitalists, they had to be-
come full citizens first.
A couple of decades later, Du Bois
reconsidered. In 1934, in a series of col-
umns in The Crisis, the official publi-
cation of the N.A.A.C.P., he argued
that “thinking colored people of the
United States” were too preoccupied
with integration. He suggested that, in
the face of prejudice and violence, Black
people should use the power of the
market to liberate themselves. “The
great step ahead today is for the Amer-
ican Negro to accomplish his economic
emancipation through voluntary de-
termined cooperative effort,” he wrote.
He extolled the value of Black churches,
colleges, and newspapers, and charged
that the N.A.A.C.P. had lost sight of
its historic support for “Negro busi-
ness enterprise.”
This argument got Du Bois can-
celled, in the literal sense: under pres-
sure, he resigned from the N.A.A.C.P.
and discontinued his column, despite
the fact that he was the founding edi-
tor of The Crisis, and a co-founder of
the N.A.A.C.P. itself. In the Pittsburgh
Courier, a leading Black newspaper, Du
Bois’s change of heart was headline
news: “RACE STUNNED AS FORMER
CHAMPION OF EQUAL RIGHTS AS-
SUMES PACIFIST ATTITUDE.” In fact,
the columns did not seem especially
pacific. Du Bois wrote with enthusiasm
about all the things Black people could
do without white help. And his final
dispatch for The Crisis, published in
June, was an extraordinary cry of an-
guish and defiance:Negroes are not wanted.... What can we
do about it? We cannot use force. We cannot
enforce law, even if we get it on the statute
books. So long as overwhelming public opin-
ion sanctions and justifies and defends color
segregation, we are helpless, and without rem-
edy.... We have got to renounce a program
that always involves humiliating self-stultify-
ing scrambling to crawl somewhere where we
are not wanted; where we crouch panting like
a whipped dog. We have got to stop this and
learn that on such a program they cannot build
manhood. No, by God, stand erect in a mud-
puddle and tell the white world to go to hell,
rather than lick boots in a parlor.The cause of Black capitalism has
often been championed not by success-
ful entrepreneurs but by leaders who
wanted to “tell the white world to go
to hell,” even if they didn’t agree about