THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 27
ing it was “a counterrevolutionary po-
sition.” To many Black people, “Black
capitalism” had come to mean “Black
control” of local neighborhoods, local
industry. How could any Black Pan-
ther be opposed to that?
Arguments about Black capitalism
were often rather theoretical. But there
was one place in America where a group
of pioneers tried to build a commu-
nity devoted to it, upholding both Nix-
onian free enterprise and Black self-de-
termination. The place was Soul City,
a settlement in rural North Carolina,
near the Virginia border, which was
founded in 1969, and which is the sub-
ject of a new book by Thomas Healy,
a law professor and a former journal-
ist. In “Soul City,” he explains how this
experiment in Black capitalism was
tried, and also how it failed. It is no
spoiler to acknowledge this failure at
the outset; Healy’s subtitle refers to Soul
City as “the Lost Dream of an Amer-
ican Utopia.” The modern story of race
in America might be told quite differ-
ently if there really were, as there was
once meant to be, a prosperous Black
mini-metropolis of fifty-five thousand
people in North Carolina, serving as
a beacon for activists and entrepre-
neurs everywhere. If Soul City had
succeeded, perhaps its founder would
be enshrined alongside Martin Luther
King, Jr., and Malcolm X in the pan-
theon of Black uplift.
That founder was Floyd McKissick,
a lawyer who had risen through the
ranks to become the leader of the Con-
gress of Racial Equality, or CORE, which
he helped transform into a militant al-
ternative to more cautious civil-rights
organizations like the National Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Col-
ored People. He left CORE, it seems,
not so much because he wanted to make
money as because he felt that the best
way to help Black people in America
was to help some of them make money.
Healy argues that McKissick’s dream
of a new Black homeland in rural North
Carolina could have come true, if not
for the backlash it inspired. “It was
going to be a beautiful place to live,”
one of the earliest residents said.
Healy is one of many who have de-
scribed Soul City as a would-be uto-
pia, but McKissick viewed himself as
a realist and a wised-up dealmaker.
Like many Black capitalists through-
out history, he had been frustrated by
the slow pace and limited success of
governmental reforms. “Unless the
Black Man attains economic indepen-
dence,” he wrote, “any ‘political inde-
pendence’ will be an illusion.” As he
discovered, these two forms of inde-
pendence can be hard to disentangle.
The demise of Soul City effectively
ended McKissick’s time as a national
public figure, but the lure of Black eco-
nomic independence never faded. Last
year, following the protests for racial
justice, many organizations and corpo-
rations launched initiatives to support
Black-owned businesses; Facebook
urged users to “#BuyBlack for the hol-
idays.” The idea hasn’t changed much
since Nixon’s time: to see that every
Homer Pitts gets his “piece of the ac-
tion.” As an ideal, Black capitalism has
endured. But how does it work?M
cKissick had once been an ac-
complished integrationist. After
being turned away from the Univer-
sity of North Carolina’s law school,
which barred Black students, he be-
came one of the plaintiffs in a case
brought by the N.A.A.C.P., which
won a court order in 1951 that obliged
U.N.C. to admit McKissick and change
its policies. (Once there, McKissick
did some impromptu activism at the
segregated swimming pool, jumping
in fully dressed and declaring, “It’s in-
tegrated now!”) In 1959, two of his chil-
dren enrolled at a previously all-white
public school in Durham. And in 1966,
as the newly installed national director
of CORE, he joined the March Against
Fear, a walking protest through Ten-
nessee and Mississippi, alongside King
and a younger radical, Stokely Carmi-
chael. In this magazine, Renata Adler
reported that McKissick initially “me-
diated” between King and his follow-
ers, who called for “freedom now,” and
Carmichael’s group, who chanted,
“Black power!” The march helped pro-
pel “Black power” into the public con-
sciousness, and it may have helped
radicalize McKissick, who was with
the group in Canton, Mississippi, when
it was teargassed by state troopers.
That night, McKissick made it clear
that he was siding with Carmichael.
“They don’t call it white power,” hesaid, referring to the teargassers and
their allies. “They just call it power.
I’m committed to non-violence, but I
say what we need is to get us some
black power.”
CORE had been founded, in 1942, to
fight segregation; McKissick gave it a
more assertively Black identity. Not
long before the march, he had moved
its headquarters from lower Manhat-
tan to Harlem, and the next year CORE
expunged the word “multiracial” from
its official self-description, effectively
sidelining its white members. (A Times
editorial suggested that the change be-
tokened a policy of “segregation in re-
verse.”) McKissick emerges in Healy’s
book as a shrewd but slightly mysteri-
ous figure, propelled by a complicated
combination of strategy, pride, and con-
viction. On April 4, 1968, he was in
Cleveland, promoting an ambitious
effort to get white business owners to
build factories in the city’s “ghetto”
neighborhoods; the idea was that once
the factories had recouped their initial
investments the Black workers could
assume ownership. The same day, in
Memphis, King was assassinated, and
McKissick responded with anger and
a hint of fatalism. “Nonviolence is a
dead philosophy,” he told the Times,
“and it was not the black people that
killed it.”
At the time, McKissick was seen as
a candidate to succeed King as the
preëminent voice of Black America, but
McKissick realized that there could
never be another leader of Black Amer-
ica—it was hard enough being the leader
of CORE, which was riven by arguments
over tactics and ideology. And so, a few
months after King’s death, McKissick
left the group to start McKissick En-
terprises, which promised to invest in
everything from restaurants to book
publishing. In a brochure announcing
the new venture, McKissick said that
his focus was “the development of Black
Economic Power,” which he called the
“last chance to save the Republic.” No
more marching, and no more plead-
ing—it was time to build.
Within months, McKissick Enter-
prises decided that it would build a city.
This was not an unusual ambition; in
fact, McKissick’s genius was to bring
together two trends then ascendant.
There was a vogue for master-planned