[Soul City was a boondoggle—not a story of lost or forgotten
roads tragically not taken.]
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BLACK CAPITALISM IN ONE CITY  
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Adolph Reed Jr.
May 27, 2022
Dissent
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_ Soul City was a boondoggle—not a story of lost or forgotten roads
tragically not taken. _

A promotional pamphlet for Soul City, 1969, Heritage Art/Heritage
Images via Getty Images

 

_Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia_
by Thomas Healy
Metropolitan Books, 2021, 448 pp.

Thomas Healy’s book is an earnest and empathetic examination of Soul
City, former civil rights lawyer and national director of the Congress
of Racial Equality Floyd McKissick’s 1970s idea for a
black-designed, black-led town in Warren County, North Carolina, near
the Virginia border. The book is a moving account of McKissick’s
commitment to his vision and the many obstacles, reasonable and
unreasonable, objective and arbitrary, that hindered its realization.
As a story of McKissick the man and his nearly indefatigable
zeal, _Soul City _is nuanced and subtle, and it provides poignant,
if not always fully intentional, commentary on the limitations of the
political moment out of which McKissick’s idea emerged. Healy seems
to channel McKissick’s own enthusiasm in asking, “How could a
project that once held such promise and potential fall so depressingly
short of its goals?” His follow up questions suggest his answer:
“Was Soul City an impossible and misbegotten dream from the
beginning, or was it a brilliant idea that was thwarted by racism and
ignorance? And how might history have been different if Soul City had
succeeded?”

I confess that I was bemused on reading those questions, especially
the last. As someone who had peripheral associations with the project
and was around it from nearly the beginning to the end, I never once
believed that Soul City could be anything more than a boondoggle, much
less a game-changing intervention in black American politics.

I assisted in a shopping habits and patterns study that the Ford
Foundation–funded community development agency I worked for in
Durham conducted for Soul City in the early 1970s. Later, in the
summer of 1974, I worked in Warrenton, the seat of Warren County, for
six weeks on a research project monitoring local spending patterns of
federal revenue sharing and other funds, which provided another
perspective on Soul City. Occasionally, while visiting friends in
Warrenton into the early 1980s, I would nose around and get updates on
how little actual new development there had been at the Soul City
site. Finally, during a car trip in late 2006 or early 2007, I pulled
off I-85 on a lark to see what remained of the location. I was taken
aback when I encountered a medium-security prison, which Healy
describes in the book, and a factory under construction across the
street, which was clearly being built to accommodate use of prison
labor. That seemed like ignominious punctuation to the demise of
McKissick’s vanity project, with its mixture of a class-skewed
quixotic vision and blatant political opportunism.

From that perspective, the more interesting question is what led Healy
to see the Soul City experiment as having offered such promise.
Perhaps his respect for McKissick encouraged a reflexive embrace of
McKissick’s assessment of the scheme’s potential. Healy’s
premise also comports with a romantic trope of recovering lost or
forgotten roads tragically not taken, which has become conventional in
a moment when boundaries between lay and professional historiography,
and between writing about the past and doing politics, have dissolved
under the pressure of claims to social relevance. The autodidact’s
indictment—“Why didn’t ‘we’ (or at least I) know
this?”—has elevated expressions of aggrievement above pursuit of
understanding in approaches to black political history. This
interpretive environment encourages extracting events, people, and
tendencies from their contexts in the past to treat them as appendages
to moralistic claims for the present.

Healy contextualizes the Soul City experiment in some ways but not
necessarily those that were most important. He situates McKissick’s
idea in relation to an ideal variously characterized as black
“self-determination,” “economic self-sufficiency,” “control
over their own destiny,” or “economic parity.” In addition to
discussing Soul City in relation to the broader New Communities
movement in postwar metropolitan planning and development, he links
McKissick’s ideal to the formation of all-black towns in the late
nineteenth century and relates it to Booker T. Washington’s agenda
of racial self-help and business development.

It is only a garnish in Healy’s overall narrative, but the assertion
that we should see Soul City as continuous with a lineage that
includes post-Emancipation black towns and settlements is a reach.
Some of those settlements formed serendipitously, as Healy himself
acknowledges; some were intentionally created and were products of
conscious movements motivated by pragmatic concerns, such as the quest
for rich farmland or escape from strictures of racial regulation.
Freedpeople did not, nor do most other people of whatever racial
classification, typically pursue abstractions like racial
self-determination. Those are motives scholars or ideologues project
onto others’ actions, which stem from messier and more ambiguous
sources. Such characterizations are likely to reinforce the
interpretive agendas of those who project them, and they are often
intended to assert or reinforce a sense of collective singularity of
purpose.

I mention this to draw attention to another interpretive problem that
continues to plague how we think and write about black Americans’
political life. Formulations that stress continuity of purported
racial traditions—and this includes constructs like a
transhistorical, transcontextual “black liberation struggle,”
“black freedom movement,” or “long civil rights
movement”—are alternatives to explanations of phenomena in their
own time and contexts.

Soul City does invite comparison, however, with one nineteenth-century
black town: Mound Bayou, Mississippi, which Healy mentions (though he
mistakenly locates it in Louisiana). Mound Bayou, like Soul City, was
conceived as an individual’s dream to demonstrate black
self-sufficiency and racial advancement, and it could provide a
cautionary tale. It was founded by Isaiah T. Montgomery and his cousin
Benjamin in 1887. Montgomery’s city-building vision, like
McKissick’s, depended on support from financial and philanthropic
interests as well as state and local governments. That decreed a
political strategy of courting the good will of ruling-class political
interests, not Populists, workers, or farmers who could do nothing to
advance the vision. To wit, Montgomery dismissed black political
participation as a distraction, although he was engaged actively in
the state’s Republican factional politics. Moreover, he was the only
black delegate to the 1890 state constitutional convention that
disfranchised the black population and installed white supremacy as
the foundation of the state’s government. A member of a committee on
the franchise, appointments, and elections, Montgomery voted for
disfranchisement and endorsed the white supremacist regime from the
floor. He claimed he was laying “the suffrage of 123,000 of my
fellow-men at the feet of this convention” as “an olive branch of
peace,” but Montgomery’s position didn’t reflect a consensus
among black Mississippians, who reviled him as a traitor.

Mound Bayou underscores the problem of formulations that posit generic
racial political programs, like “self-determination”: they hinge
on a slippage between first-person singular and first-person plural
that can mystify elite agendas. Part of the price of Montgomery’s
experiment in “racial” accomplishment was his support for the
disenfranchisement of nearly the entire black population of
Mississippi, a price that he unilaterally determined was acceptable.
Incidentally, Montgomery became one of the richest black people in the
state.

In one respect, the comparison of Soul City and Mound Bayou is
unfair—to Mound Bayou. By 1915, the town boasted a population of
over 1,000 and was home to twenty-three stores and shops, including
two drug stores, and two licensed physicians, two lawyers, a
real-estate agent, and six churches. At one point it had three cotton
gins. Soul City never came close to reaching that population size or
extent of institutional development. Its most substantial historical
footprint was as a conduit for federal funds that installed a regional
water system for Warren, Vance, and Granville counties. It also
secured $2 million in education funding for Warren and Vance counties
and $1.8 million for healthcare services.

The Washington connection is pertinent in this regard as well. The
conviction that accumulation of property and wealth mark the most
secure and dependable route to black advancement has defined a
tendency in black American discourse since the late nineteenth
century. That view, then and since, has been shared most widely among
business and professional strata, and aspirants to those strata, as
historians August Meier, Judith Stein, and Kevin K. Gaines have
established in their studies of Bookerism. Roy Wilkins, executive
director of the NAACP from 1964 to 1977, dismissed “black
capitalism” as “simple nonsense,” noting that “the bulk of all
people who work will earn their living as workers—as employees, not
as entrepreneurs.” (Yet he subsequently lauded Soul City as the
Nixon administration’s sole true contribution to black people.)
McKissick’s embrace of Bookerism was somewhat ambivalent, at least
at the rhetorical level; he wanted capitalism without its cutthroat,
inegalitarian connotations. Healy reports that McKissick did not like
the term “black capitalism” but “preferred ‘black
entrepreneurialism’ or even ‘black socialism,’ believing those
terms better captured the combination of wealth accumulation and
redistribution he had in mind.” 

McKissick’s desire for an idealized capitalism reflected the
incoherence of the Black Power ideology that informed his dreams for
Soul City. Healy mentions Robert L. Allen’s critique of corporate
funding in Black Power circles in his 1969 book _Black Awakening in
Capitalist America_, and his argument that black capitalism, as Healy
puts it, “would simply replace white exploiters with black ones.”
More pointedly, Harold Cruse sharply criticized Black Power
advocates’ reluctance to acknowledge the conservative, Bookerite
implications of their ideology and what he saw as a willful confusion
regarding their programmatic antecedents (they preferred to claim
political descent from Third World anti-colonialist revolutionaries).
McKissick was hardly alone in believing, or wanting to believe, that
racial alchemy could save black enterprise from rehearsing
capitalism’s systemic logic of accumulation by dispossession and
generations of economic inequality.

As much as Soul City was the product of Floyd McKissick’s
imagination and tenacious effort, it was also an expression of the
institutionalization of Black Power in the late 1960s. McKissick’s
dream of a self-sufficient, black-led town developed from scratch
depended from the first on government and foundation support. That
dependence was intensified by McKissick’s commitment to locate Soul
City in rural Warren County, which offered neither developed
infrastructure nor a substantial workforce. Healy chronicles
McKissick’s often poignantly frustrating efforts to line up
potential private investors through the layered bureaucratic processes
required to access the federal grants and loan guarantees that would
have been necessary to undertake his development project. Similarly,
McKissick had to try to reconcile the fact that he dreamed of
a _black _city with the limitation that federal funds would not go
to support a racially separatist venture. He argued that it both was
and was not intended to be an all-black undertaking, which was a
further source of confusion.

The question Healy does not ask is why anyone should have cared then
or should care now about the difficulties that confronted
McKissick’s dream. It never could have made a dent in black poverty
or unemployment. Access to a low-wage labor force was McKissick’s
principal enticement to companies he attempted to woo. Historian Devin
Fergus has pointed out that McKissick openly touted the state’s
anti-union right-to-work laws in his promotional materials, a gambit
that prompted Bayard Rustin to rebuke McKissick privately, noting, as
Fergus puts it, that “closing the city to unions would be anathema
to the late A. Philip Randolph, whose name had been affixed on the
Industrial Park in Soul City from the project’s early days.”
McKissick’s response to Rustin’s criticism was to drop
Randolph’s name from the industrial park.

Healy does his lawyerly best to paint McKissick’s alliance with the
Nixon administration in the most politically respectable light. He
even strains to suggest that Nixon’s commitment of $19 million of
federal Housing and Urban Development funds to Soul City was not a
quid pro quo for McKissick’s aggressive support for the
president’s 1972 reelection campaign. The fact is, though, if the
Nixon administration had not made that large infusion of money to the
project, it would have shriveled and died years sooner. And, as if in
the spirit of Isaiah T. Montgomery, McKissick attempted to court
ultra-reactionary North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms, who
made clear even before he was elected that he intended to pull the
plug on the Soul City project, even though the state’s other
Republican leadership actively supported it. Helms emphatically
rebuffed McKissick’s gestures of rapprochement.

The Nixon administration’s support for Soul City was consistent with
its reformulation of Black Power as “black capitalism.”
McKissick’s project could be something of a poster child,
particularly in concert with his service in the reelection campaign.
In a parallel development, the Ford Foundation and the federal Office
of Economic Opportunity began shifting priorities by the end of the
1960s to support economic development projects over social service
provision or mobilization of the poor. This marked a retreat from left
or insurgent politics under the flag of Black Power. Soul City is, in
that context, most significantly an emblem of the class character and
contradictions of Black Power as a politics and ideology.

Healy asserts that McKissick’s dream lives on in the Black Lives
Matter protests of 2014 and beyond, because what black people “in
Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte, Minneapolis, and so many other cities
are demanding today is the same thing McKissick was seeking five
decades earlier: respect, dignity, and control over their own
destiny.” This is a forgivable author’s device, an attempt to
encourage interest in his account among those who may not find Floyd
McKissick’s story as riveting as he does. But the level of
abstraction at which it is plausible to equate demands for justice in
policing and the desire to develop an all-black town as pursuing
“control over their own destiny” is vacuous. One may as well
contend that they all shared an interest in breathing air. While Healy
has no insidious motives, this tendency to ventriloquize all black
people as wanting the same thing is one of the greatest impediments we
face in trying to understand black American political history.

_ADOLPH REED JR. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the
University of Pennsylvania specializing in studies of issues of
racism and U.S. politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern, and the
New School for Social Research and he has written on racial and
economic inequality. His most recent book is The South: Jim Crow and
Its Afterlives (Verso, 2022). He serves on the boards of Food and
Water Action and the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute and is a regular on
DJDI’s Class Matters [[link removed]] podcast._

_DISSENT is a quarterly magazine of politics and ideas. Founded by
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* Black Capitalism
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* Floyd McKissick
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* CORE
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* class
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* African American history
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* poverty
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* unemployment
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