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Soul City: half a million dollars toward
the construction of an industrial park,
and a million toward a health-care cen-
ter. In July, 1972, the federal government
agreed to guarantee fourteen million
dollars of Soul City’s debt, for infra-
structure improvements, like road pav-
ing and electrification, meant to lure
businesses. Healy suggests that Mc-
Kissick deserved these grants, but he
also concedes that McKissick was sell-
ing his political loyalty, at the same mo-
ment that the Nixon Administration
was looking to buy some.
McKissick was not mentioned in
the Senate’s 1974 Watergate report, but
it documented the existence of what
was known within the White House
as the Responsiveness Program. One
memo, from 1972, called for “incentives
for Black individuals, firms, and orga-
nizations whose support will have a
multiplier effect on Black vote support
for the President.” Another hailed the
existence of “an excellent group of vis-
ible Blacks” who had received funding
as part of the program. During the 1972
campaign, McKissick was indeed un-
usually “visible.” He gave speeches on
the importance of liberating Black vot-
ers from Democratic “captivity,” and
the Nixon campaign published an ad-
vertisement featuring Soul City: “Dem-
ocrats endorsed it. Republicans sup-
ported it. That’s Action.” After Nixon
was reëlected, George H. W.
Bush, who was then in
charge of the Republican
National Committee, sug-
gested that McKissick was
helping to change the image
of the G.O.P.
Even with the President
on its side, though, Soul
City faced extraordinary po-
litical opposition. Newspa-
per articles noted that, de-
spite lots of federal money, the town
still hadn’t sprung to life; the Govern-
ment Accountability Office hunted for
corruption and impropriety, though it
found nothing worse than occasional
incompetence. Matters weren’t helped
when, in 1972, a former Democrat named
Jesse Helms won a North Carolina race
for the U.S. Senate—as a Republican,
although with no help from McKissick,
who declined to endorse a candidate.
Helms was known for his hostility to
the civil-rights movement, and he told
McKissick, “I do not favor the expen-
diture of taxpayers’ funds for the proj-
ect known as ‘Soul City.’ ”
It isn’t clear that McKissick was
wasting taxpayer money, but the idea
was hard to refute, especially when Soul
City consisted mainly of a health clinic,
a few shops, a cluster of trailers, and
some upgraded utilities. McKissick’s
support for Nixon wasn’t much of an
asset after Nixon’s resignation, and his
Republicanism, however nominal, was
even less helpful after the election, in
1976, of Jimmy Carter, a Democrat who
was sympathetic to civil rights but not
particularly interested in Soul City. At
one point, McKissick even considered
changing the name, which he loved, as
a way of making his town more appeal-
ing to white corporations and tenants.
(A report commissioned by HUD had
found that the name had “a negative
connotation” for white people.) HUD
finally foreclosed on the property in
May, 1980, leaving McKissick Enter-
prises with a small fraction of the land
and some mortgages to pay. He rejoined
the Democratic Party and lived quietly
as a trial lawyer and, after a late-in-life
divinity degree, a preacher; he died from
lung cancer, in 1991, aged sixty-nine.
Today, in the former future home of
Soul City, there is not much to see be-
sides a medium-security prison—a
planned community but in
no sense a utopia.
One of the people who
helped plan Soul City was
a young Black architect
named Harvey Gantt, who
later became the mayor of
Charlotte, and who twice
ran for the Senate as a
Democrat against Helms,
unsuccessfully. Talking
to Healy, Gantt says that
when he thinks of Soul City he some-
times wonders, “Why did I think that
was going to succeed?” In defense of
McKissick’s vision, Healy points out
that Soul City was not unusually trou-
bled: HUD funded thirteen new towns,
only one of which endures today—
the Woodlands, a majority-white out-
lying suburb of Houston. It is impos-
sible to disprove the contention that,
with sufficient government investment,
Soul City might have thrived. (Withsufficient support, just about any set-
tlement might succeed.) But the prom-
ise of Black capitalism was a promise
of independence, a promise that Black
people could run their own businesses
and make their own rules. What Mc-
Kissick learned was that, for a Black
leader in nineteen-seventies America,
begging Republicans for money was
not necessarily more rewarding, or less
humiliating, than begging Democrats
for money. One can imagine a world
in which a Black planned community
in North Carolina would be met with
widespread enthusiasm and generous
federal funding. But in that world many
other government programs might look
much more feasible, too, and McKis-
sick might not have had cause to com-
plain about the “sugar tit” of the Dem-
ocratic Party. In that world, he might
not have felt moved to create a new
city at all.T
here is a paradox at the heart of
“Black capitalism,” two words that
pull in opposite directions, toward both
community-mindedness and individ-
ual striving. When Du Bois proposed
“economic emancipation through vol-
untary determined cooperative effort,”
a slogan not designed with placards in
mind, he was simultaneously embrac-
ing the private sector and urging it to
be more public-spirited. And, of course,
Soul City, even in theory, turned out
to be something less than an archetype
of Black capitalism. Because the set-
tlement relied on HUD funding, it was
prohibited from discriminating against
any potential resident. In other words,
McKissick could not accurately say that
his city would be unambiguously cap-
italist, or unambiguously Black.
Aside from Soul City, Nixon’s major
Black-capitalist initiative was the cre-
ation, in 1969, of the Office of Minority
Business Enterprise, which is now
known as the Minority Business De-
velopment Agency, and which func-
tions as a kind of internal lobbying
group. (In December, the incoming
Biden Administration said that it was
going to direct the M.B.D.A. to “co-
ordinate all federal offices to reduce
barriers to procurement for underrep-
resented groups, including all types of
minority-owned businesses.”) The mod-
esty of Nixon’s efforts to support Black