In the fall of 1968, Jet, the Black weekly magazine, devoted a special issue to the upcoming election. On the cover was a cheerful headline: “how black vote can elect next president.” Inside, the editors were less upbeat, reproaching the candidates for not doing more to “woo actively” the Black vote. In an effort to do some last-minute wooing, both of the major candidates had taken out two-page advertisements in the issue. Hubert Humphrey, the Democrat, was popular with Black voters, and sought to remind readers of something he felt they should already know. “Vote for Hubert Humphrey and you’ll help elect the right man President,” his advertisement said. “Don’t vote and you’ll help elect the wrong one.” The “wrong one”—Richard Nixon, the Republican contender—had a more specific pitch. His ad showed a Black man in a letterman sweater, beneath the exhortation “This time, vote like Homer Pitts’ whole world depended on it.” Pitts, it seemed, was a fictional college student facing an uncertain future. And there was a Presidential candidate who wanted to help him:
This was the heart of Nixon’s outreach to Black voters in 1968: “Black capitalism,” an ideal of independence that promised to unite militants and moderates, Black nationalists and white centrists. This sales pitch does not seem to have been a big success. Although Nixon won, narrowly, polls and voting data suggest that Black voters went predominantly for Humphrey. And yet the notion of “Black capitalism” gained influence, prompting an ongoing debate about what it meant, and whether it represented progress. The Black Panther Party often denounced capitalism, and Bobby Seale, who helped found the group, wrote in 1970 that Black capitalism was part of the problem. “We do not fight exploitative capitalism with black capitalism,” he declared. “We fight capitalism with basic socialism.” But the next year another founding Panther, Huey P. Newton, wrote that Black capitalism could contribute to liberation, and that rejecting it was “a counterrevolutionary position.” To many Black people, “Black capitalism” had come to mean “Black control” of local neighborhoods, local industry. How could any Black Panther 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 community devoted to it, upholding both Nixonian free enterprise and Black self-determination. The place was Soul City, a settlement in rural North Carolina, near the Virginia border, which was founded in 1969, and which is the subject of a new book by Thomas Healy, a law professor and a former journalist. 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 American Utopia.” The modern story of race in America might be told quite differently 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 entrepreneurs everywhere. If Soul City had succeeded, perhaps its founder would be enshrined alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in the pantheon of Black uplift.
That founder was Floyd McKissick, a lawyer who had risen through the ranks to become the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, or core, which he helped transform into a militant alternative to more cautious civil-rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 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 described Soul City as a would-be utopia, but McKissick viewed himself as a realist and a wised-up dealmaker. Like many Black capitalists throughout history, he had been frustrated by the slow pace and limited success of governmental reforms. “Unless the Black Man attains economic independence,” he wrote, “any ‘political independence’ will be an illusion.” As he discovered, these two forms of independence 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 economic independence never faded. Last year, following the protests for racial justice, many organizations and corporations launched initiatives to support Black-owned businesses; Facebook urged users to “#BuyBlack for the holidays.” The idea hasn’t changed much since Nixon’s time: to see that every Homer Pitts gets his “piece of the action.” As an ideal, Black capitalism has endured. But how does it work?
McKissick had once been an accomplished integrationist. After being turned away from the University of North Carolina’s law school, which barred Black students, he became 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 integrated now!”) In 1959, two of his children 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 Tennessee and Mississippi, alongside King and a younger radical, Stokely Carmichael. In this magazine, Renata Adler reported that McKissick initially “mediated” between King and his followers, who called for “freedom now,” and Carmichael’s group, who chanted, “Black power!” The march helped propel “Black power” into the public consciousness, 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,” he said, 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 Manhattan 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 betokened a policy of “segregation in reverse.”) McKissick emerges in Healy’s book as a shrewd but slightly mysterious figure, propelled by a complicated combination of strategy, pride, and conviction. 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 America—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 Enterprises, 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 pleading—it was time to build.
Within months, McKissick Enterprises 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 communities, sometimes known as “new towns,” such as Reston, Virginia, founded in 1964, and Columbia, Maryland, 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 reflected 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 skeptical 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 America; the whole idea was to build something where just about nothing existed, so as not to be influenced by whatever it was that made many Black neighborhoods inimical to prosperity. McKissick found a plot of eighteen hundred 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 McKissick half the purchase price, and the seller agreed to accept it as a down payment. In late February, 1969, McKissick 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 depended on the benevolence of white government officials. As McKissick was launching his company, President Lyndon 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 attempting to shake money loose from the Nixon Administration. Dozens of construction workers took up residence in trailers on the property, but prospective employers weren’t eager to move to Soul City without 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 creditors within the next ten days will be on the attack unless McKissick Enterprises secures additional funds.” In his effort to get free from white control, and from political wrangling, McKissick wound up more ensnarled in these things than ever.
The 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 hardships. “It is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world,” Washington said. He promised his Black listeners that they could prosper through hard work, and promised white listeners that Black people would not immediately demand full rights or full integration. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,” Washington said, “yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” The speech transformed Washington into a celebrity, 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 Atlanta Compromise”), and argued that it was “utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage.” If Black people were to be effective capitalists, they had to become full citizens first.
A couple of decades later, Du Bois reconsidered. In 1934, in a series of columns in The Crisis, the official publication 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 American Negro to accomplish his economic emancipation through voluntary determined 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 business enterprise.”
This argument got Du Bois cancelled, in the literal sense: under pressure, he resigned from the N.A.A.C.P. and discontinued his column, despite the fact that he was the founding editor 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 assumes 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 anguish and defiance:
The cause of Black capitalism has often been championed not by successful entrepreneurs but by leaders who wanted to “tell the white world to go to hell,” even if they didn’t agree about 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 international movement for Black liberation. To fund his shipping company, the Black Star Line, he issued hundreds 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 convicted of fraud, but he was widely revered 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 resettle in Africa, a continent that he himself 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 naïveté. “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,” Muhammad wrote, in 1965. He counselled his readers to buy farmland and start businesses 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 approach” that would be grounded in “Black capitalism.” The speech helped popularize the term, and it attracted the attention of a number of Black leaders, 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.”
Two 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 serious car accident. Charmaine tells Healy that, when she went to see her father in the hospital, he feigned outrage 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 dividing the present dream from the future reality could hardly be greater if Mr. McKissick intended to build this city on the moon.”) But its existence, even in a preliminary form, was a tangible example of Black capitalism under Nixon, and so in late 1971, when McKissick had trouble getting loans from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he wrote to a friend in the Administration that he was prepared to switch sides from Democrat to Republican, 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 gathering of Black Nixon supporters who included Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, and the jazz musician Lionel Hampton, who performed an original composition, “We Need Nixon.” The song seems to have been less memorable 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 secured a pair of government grants for Soul City: half a million dollars toward the construction of an industrial park, and a million toward a health-care center. In July, 1972, the federal government agreed to guarantee fourteen million dollars of Soul City’s debt, for infrastructure improvements, like road paving and electrification, meant to lure businesses. Healy suggests that McKissick deserved these grants, but he also concedes that McKissick was selling his political loyalty, at the same moment 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 organizations whose support will have a multiplier effect on Black vote support for the President.” Another hailed the existence of “an excellent group of visible Blacks” who had received funding as part of the program. During the 1972 campaign, McKissick was indeed unusually “visible.” He gave speeches on the importance of liberating Black voters from Democratic “captivity,” and the Nixon campaign published an advertisement featuring Soul City: “Democrats endorsed it. Republicans supported it. That’s Action.” After Nixon was reëlected, George H. W. Bush, who was then in charge of the Republican National Committee, suggested 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 political opposition. Newspaper articles noted that, despite lots of federal money, the town still hadn’t sprung to life; the Government 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 expenditure of taxpayers’ funds for the project known as ‘Soul City.’ ”
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 sometimes 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 troubled: hud funded thirteen new towns, only one of which endures today—the Woodlands, a majority-white outlying suburb of Houston. It is impossible to disprove the contention that, with sufficient government investment, Soul City might have thrived. (With sufficient support, just about any settlement might succeed.) But the promise of Black capitalism was a promise of independence, a promise that Black people could run their own businesses and make their own rules. What McKissick 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 McKissick might not have had cause to complain about the “sugar tit” of the Democratic Party. In that world, he might not have felt moved to create a new city at all.
There is a paradox at the heart of “Black capitalism,” two words that pull in opposite directions, toward both community-mindedness and individual striving. When Du Bois proposed “economic emancipation through voluntary determined cooperative effort,” a slogan not designed with placards in mind, he was simultaneously embracing 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 settlement 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 capitalist, or unambiguously Black.
Aside from Soul City, Nixon’s major Black-capitalist initiative was the creation, in 1969, of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, which is now known as the Minority Business Development Agency, and which functions 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 “coordinate all federal offices to reduce barriers to procurement for underrepresented groups, including all types of minority-owned businesses.”) The modesty of Nixon’s efforts to support Black capitalism made the term itself sound rather cynical, especially once his various schemes had been exposed.
But the entrepreneurial spirit Nixon identified really did exist—there was a reason that, in 1968, “Black capitalism” seemed like an appealing political slogan. It was a time when many corporations were scrambling to appear supportive of social change, and many activists were trying to decide what to make of them. In a recent book titled “Franchise,” the historian Marcia Chatelain chronicles how McDonald’s reacted to protests and urban unrest in the nineteen-sixties: by recruiting Black franchisees, who in 1972 came together to found the National Black McDonald’s Operators Association. It still exists, and calls itself “the largest organization of established African American entrepreneurs in the world.” If Black capitalism works, then this is how: not through high-profile government initiatives but through trade groups that most people have never heard of—Black capitalists quietly helping one another make money.
One of the oddest things about Black capitalism is that its major proponents have generally emerged from the world of activism, not of capitalism. Madam C. J. Walker, who built an empire of beauty products in the nineteen-tens, was among the most celebrated Black entrepreneurs of the twentieth century and a strong supporter of civil rights, but she did not generally speak the language of Black capitalism. If “Black capitalist” described her life, it did not necessarily describe her ideology. George and Joan Johnson were the founders of Johnson Products, the first Black-owned company to be listed on the American Stock Exchange (in 1971), but they, too, seemed more interested in practicing Black capitalism than in preaching it. Even apparently sympathetic politicians have often declined to wave the banner of Black capitalism. “Black capitalism is not our panacea,” Maynard Jackson, the vice-mayor of Atlanta, declared at a National Urban League conference in 1970. Three years later, he was elected the city’s first Black mayor, and he helped establish Atlanta as a Black business hub—the real Soul City, you might say. And some community groups, like the Harlem Commonwealth Council, prospered by helping draw businesses to preëxisting Black communities. By contrast, the avowed Black capitalists have sometimes produced more inspiration than enrichment. Floyd McKissick once wrote that Marcus Garvey, despite his “financial failure,” had done a lot for “Black pride and cohesiveness.” Healy writes a similar encomium to McKissick near the end of his book, lauding his “vision and courage.” He dreamed big, and he went bust. Perhaps that, too, is Black capitalism.
Paeans to Black capitalism are everywhere, even though the term has fallen out of favor. In 1971, Huey Newton argued that Black capitalists were more trustworthy than white capitalists, not because they were nobler but because they were weaker and poorer, and therefore had to be more accountable. “If he wants to succeed in his enterprise,” Newton wrote, “the Black capitalist must turn to the community because he depends on them to make his profits.” This formulation helps explain why ambitious Black capitalists have tended not to espouse Black capitalism: they know that in order to prosper they may have to grow less dependent on the Black community and more tightly integrated into the broader economy. Half a century after Nixon’s campaign promise, it is still unclear how much the federal government can do to foster Black business ownership; in the world of entrepreneurship, as elsewhere, racial disparities have survived many attempted remedies. But there seems to be broad agreement that we should celebrate the achievements of Black entrepreneurs and executives, no matter which communities they serve. This, after all, is the promise of capitalism, and often the reality: it makes us less separate, while also making us less equal. The world it creates does not resemble a utopia—unless, of course, you compare it with the world that came before. ♦
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