“Do you prefer to have your medication hidden
in the salmon crudo or the beef tartare?”where they wanted the Black world to
go. In 1916, a Jamaican crusader named
Marcus Garvey arrived in the United
States and set about building an inter-
national movement for Black libera-
tion. To fund his shipping company,
the Black Star Line, he issued hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of
shares, using the proceeds to buy three
steamships, none of which turned out
to be particularly seaworthy. Investors
lost their money, and Garvey was con-
victed of fraud, but he was widely re-
vered for his grand parades, and for his
vision of a world where Black people
could do without white people. He
often urged Black Americans to reset-
tle in Africa, a continent that he him-
self never visited.
Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the
Nation of Islam, promoted a similar
mixture of Black nationalism and Black
capitalism, telling his followers, “Build
your own homes, schools, hospitals, and
factories.” Precisely because he trusted
white people so little—he taught that
they were devils—Muhammad warned
Black people not to expect much from
them, reproaching King and other civil-
rights leaders for their dangerous na-
ïveté. “Get away from that childish
way of thinking that the white man
forever owes it to you to provide for
you the necessities of life,” Muham-
mad wrote, in 1965. He counselled his
readers to buy farmland and start busi-
nesses instead.
Nixon was not wrong to discern in
this tradition a conservative impulse.
Compared with King, who had called
for billions of dollars of federal aid for
“the Negro community,” many Black-
power advocates seemed to be making
less expensive demands. In April, 1968,
Nixon gave a radio address in which he
claimed that some of the “militant” Black
activists were on his side, or ought to
be. He praised those who abandoned
“welfarist” rhetoric in order to extol the
importance of “ownership” and “self-
respect.” And he called for a “new ap-
proach” that would be grounded in
“Black capitalism.” The speech helped
popularize the term, and it attracted
the attention of a number of Black lead-
ers, including McKissick, who met with
Nixon the next month. McKissick didn’t
endorse Nixon in 1968, but he wrote a
series of cautiously optimistic columns
in the Amsterdam News, a Black weekly
newspaper, saying that he expected Nixon
to “make many changes for the good of
Black People.” He also issued a warning:
“If Nixon talks Black Capitalism, he
must deliver.”T
wo years after buying the land,
McKissick finally moved to North
Carolina, with his wife, Evelyn, and
his teen-age daughter, Charmaine.
They had been living in Harlem, and
McKissick still carried himself like a
big-city power broker, even when he
was living in a construction trailer
parked next to a cornfield. A few years
later, driving from Soul City to the
local airport, he was involved in a se-
rious car accident. Charmaine tells
Healy that, when she went to see her
father in the hospital, he feigned out-
rage over what the first responders had
done to his Yves Saint Laurent outfit.
“Doodlebug, they fucked up my suit,”
he told her.
Healy’s book provides only brief
glimpses of McKissick’s personality—
just enough to convey the impression
that his grand project brought him
more sorrow than joy. From the start,
Soul City attracted plenty of media
coverage, much of it critical. (From the
Baltimore Sun: “The chasm dividingthe present dream from the future re-
ality could hardly be greater if Mr. Mc-
Kissick intended to build this city on
the moon.”) But its existence, even in
a preliminary form, was a tangible ex-
ample of Black capitalism under Nixon,
and so in late 1971, when McKissick
had trouble getting loans from the De-
partment of Housing and Urban De-
velopment, he wrote to a friend in the
Administration that he was prepared
to switch sides from Democrat to Re-
publican, and to publicly back Nixon’s
1972 reëlection campaign. The offer was
accepted, and McKissick became an
enthusiastic Nixon surrogate, giving
the keynote address at a lively gather-
ing of Black Nixon supporters who in-
cluded Betty Shabazz, the widow of
Malcolm X, and the jazz musician Li-
onel Hampton, who performed an
original composition, “We Need Nixon.”
The song seems to have been less mem-
orable than McKissick’s speech, in which
he compared the Democratic Party to
a “sugar tit,” a baby’s pacifier that offered
temporary succor but no nutrition. “I’ve
tasted a little bit of cream and a little
bit of milk,” McKissick said. “There’s
food in the land—it’s goodbye old
sugar tit!”
Not long afterward, McKissick se-
cured a pair of government grants for