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The Plan to Build a Capital for Black Capitalism

In 1969, an activist set out to build an African-American metropolis from scratch. What would have happened if Soul City had succeeded?

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.