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“Black Boy in a White Land”
Where do we go from here?
That was the question on everyone’s mind, and Floyd McKissick was certain he knew the answer.
It was May 1968, one month after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. For thirteen years, ever since the Montgomery bus boycott, King had been the moral conscience and public face of the civil rights movement. He had taken on Bull Connor and his dogs in the Birmingham campaign, inspired the nation with his soaring rhetoric in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and led the historic march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery. His demand for freedom and integration had given the movement its sense of purpose, while his gospel of love and nonviolence had provided its strategic framework. The recipient of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, King had been the most influential Black man in America—perhaps the world. And although that influence had waned in recent years as a younger generation of activists embraced more militant and separatist agendas, King was still the closest thing to a unifying Black leader.
Now he was gone, gunned down on the balcony of a Memphis motel, and the civil rights movement confronted an existential question: What next? The immediate response to King’s death had been grief and violence, with protests and riots breaking out in cities across the country. Already there had been nearly as many riots in 1968 as in any other year of the decade, itself the most tumultuous of the century. But the unrest was largely destructive, a way to release anger and frustration, not to chart a course forward. And as the fires burned out and the dust settled, the major civil rights organizations were debating which road to take and vying to show the way. Ralph Abernathy, who had assumed the reins of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, pledged to continue the Poor People’s Campaign begun earlier that year. Leading a group of three thousand demonstrators, he set up a tent city on the National Mall and demanded $30 billion in poverty relief and an economic bill of rights that would give every American a guaranteed income. Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, called for a “White People’s March” on the capital as a sign of interracial solidarity, while Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), pushed for new jobs legislation and an “Adopt a Cop” program to improve relations between Black people and the police. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, more radical than its counterparts, deleted the word “nonviolent” from its name, urged Blacks to take up arms in self-defense, and contemplated a merger with the revolutionary Black Panthers.
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) rounded out the “Big Five” civil rights groups, and it, too, was trying to determine the next step in the struggle for Black freedom. For McKissick, who had been elected national director two years earlier, the answer was clear, and in the second week of May he called a meeting of CORE’s National Action Council to share his vision.
They gathered in east Baltimore, which just weeks earlier had witnessed one of the worst riots in the country. For eight days, the city’s Black neighborhoods had resembled a war zone, with residents smashing windows, looting stores, burning buildings, and throwing rocks and bottles at police and firemen. Cops in riot gear had marched through the streets, firing tear gas, exchanging shots with snipers, and rounding up lawbreakers and onlookers by the hundreds. When local officers proved unable to quell the violence, Governor Spiro Agnew declared a state of emergency and called up five thousand National Guardsmen, and when they, too, proved inadequate, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched five thousand soldiers to the area. It took more than a week and the arrest of six thousand people to restore order, and the final toll was devastating: six people dead, seven hundred wounded, and $12 million in property damage. Even now, as council members filed into the meeting, evidence of the riots was all around them: in boarded-up windows, burned-out storefronts, and the suspicious stares of newly armed shopkeepers.
Inside, McKissick quickly got down to business. He began with a report he had drafted with the help of his assistant director, Roy Innis. Titled “A Nation Within a Nation,” the report argued that America was divided into two societies, one prosperous and white, the other impoverished and Black. A dam separated these two societies, and like all dams it held energy that could either create or destroy. The challenge was to channel that energy into a constructive program for the liberation of Black society. The prevailing approach had been to rely on government welfare, the report declared. But “handouts” were not the answer. Taxpayers disliked them because the recipients seemed ungrateful, while the recipients resented them because they offered no hope of permanent escape. Instead, the poor had to be given the same things everyone else wanted: jobs, opportunity, and control over their own destiny.
To achieve these goals, McKissick called for a sweeping program of economic development and urban reconstruction. At its heart would be a network of community corporations—nonprofit entities owned and managed by local residents. Funded by government-backed loans, these corporations would finance the creation of local businesses and provide job training for the unemployed. They would also use tax incentives to entice white companies to build plants in minority neighborhoods, train residents to operate the plants, and then sell them to the community after recovering their costs. The community corporations would use the revenue generated by the plants to invest in local businesses and pay for social services, thus creating a self-sustaining economic model. It was an ambitious and innovative plan that combined elements of free enterprise and socialism. And with an estimated price tag of $1 billion, it was far more politically palatable than the $30 billion sought as part of the Poor People’s Campaign.
But McKissick was not interested solely in urban reconstruction. In his view, the problems of the cities were inextricable from the problems of rural America. When the economies of rural areas collapsed, their residents poured into the cities in search of opportunity, which only exacerbated the overcrowding and destitution of the slums. Therefore, McKissick believed, it was vital to address rural poverty, too. And his proposal for doing so was even more ambitious than his program for urban renewal. Instead of simply providing subsidies to farmers or locating a few factories in the countryside, he wanted to build new cities across rural America. His proposal here was less detailed than his plan for community corporations. He didn’t say exactly how the land for such an undertaking might be acquired, though he indicated it might come from the federal government, which had plenty of surplus property. Nor did he explain how CORE might go about building new cities, though again he suggested that help might come from Washington, as well as from private foundations. If the details were lacking, however, McKissick’s passion for the idea was not, and his plea to the council was personal and poignant. “This is me,” he told the thirty or so members gathered that day. “This is what I believe in. This is what I’m willing to risk my life for, the same as I did when I led demonstrations.”
The council’s reaction was tepid. Some members were intrigued by McKissick’s proposal, believing that new cities, built and run by Black people, could improve conditions in urban and rural areas. But they were skeptical of CORE’s ability to acquire the land and assemble the staff necessary for such an ambitious venture. Others thought the whole plan too conservative, since it involved working within existing political and capital structures rather than overthrowing them. Still others were resistant to the entire economic thrust of McKissick’s program, insisting that CORE should stick to its traditional methods of direct action and community organizing. The debate was long and tedious, reflecting a growing rift between the radical and traditional factions of CORE. And in the end, that rift doomed McKissick’s plan. Although the council accepted his proposal for community corporations, it rejected what he viewed as the heart and soul of the program—the building of new cities.
Innis was furious. A month earlier, his thirteen-year-old son had been shot dead while playing on the streets of the Bronx, a tragic reminder of just how dangerous the cities had become. Venting his grief, he laid into the council members with a barrage of profanity. They were getting bogged down in details, he told them. They should put aside their differences and give McKissick the freedom to move forward in a bold new direction. McKissick was angry, too, but more than anything he was disappointed. The council had not just rejected a plan; it had rejected his dream. And if he couldn’t pursue that dream at CORE, he knew he would have to leave. “I have never been one who wanted to be head of an organization that was not going in the direction I wanted to go,” he explained later. He informed the council he would step down as national director as soon as it could find a replacement. The council, caught off guard by this news, did not respond at once. But three weeks later, at a meeting in Cleveland, it privately accepted his resignation. Then, as word of the shake-up began to leak, the council announced publicly that McKissick was stepping down and that Innis would take over temporarily, until a new leader could be found.
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MCKISSICK’S PRESENTATION TO the National Action Council was the first time he had formally pitched his idea of building new cities to promote economic equality. But the notion was far from new. In McKissick’s telling, he had been thinking about it since 1945, when his army unit helped rebuild ravaged villages in northeastern France. If entire towns could be reconstructed in postwar Europe, he thought to himself, why couldn’t Black people build new cities in the United States? Dreams are mysterious things, however, rarely emerging fully formed at a given moment in time. So although McKissick’s dream may have taken shape at the end of World War II, its roots—the motivation and impulses behind it—can be traced to events further back in his life.
“Black, first. American, second.” That is the opening line of the autobiography McKissick began at one point and never finished, and its meaning is clear. From his earliest days growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, he was aware that his skin color mattered more than his nationality.
Well, not exactly his earliest days. For a precious few years, McKissick had been oblivious to race, like the Zora Neale Hurston character who doesn’t realize she’s Black until the age of six, when she sees a picture of herself with a group of white children and wonders who that “dark chile” is where she’s supposed to be. “Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!” she blurts out in astonishment. For McKissick, the realization came sooner, and in a more crushing way.
It happened in 1926, when he was four years old and riding the trolley with his aunt. He had never been on the trolley before, and as he climbed the steps he saw the conductor talking to two white boys, showing them how he operated the car. McKissick’s aunt dropped her coin in the slot and walked to the rear, but he stayed up front, hoping to hear what the conductor said. When the man saw him standing there, he erupted in anger, ordering McKissick to get his “black ass” to the back of the car. McKissick, unaware that the conductor was talking to him, pointed to a handle and asked, “What’s that?” to which the conductor replied by again ordering him to the back. Then, glaring down the aisle toward McKissick’s aunt, he yelled, “Negress, you better come up here and get your black son of a bitch and take him back there with you.” And as his aunt grabbed McKissick, half pulling, half guiding him to the rear of the trolley, the conductor added, “You’d better teach that boy some manners or he’s going to get into a hell of a lot of trouble.”
It was a small incident in some ways, the kind that was repeated every day in trolleys and buses across the Jim Crow South. But for McKissick, it was devastating. He saw the hatred on the conductor’s red face, the white boys laughing at him, the tears running down his aunt’s cheeks. “What did I do wrong?” he asked her in confusion. She just told him to hush, then reached into her purse for a handkerchief, kissed him softly on the head, and said, “One day, you’ll understand.”
Just as important as the incident on the trolley was what happened afterward, when he arrived home. His parents, aunt, and uncle gathered around him in the living room of their small house and told him over and over how much they loved him. “Just because you are black don’t mean your people don’t love you,” they said. “They do love you and you ought to be able to do what anybody else can. You ought to be able to watch the trolley man work, but you will find that there are a whole lot of mean white people in this world.” Later that afternoon, helping his father in the garden, he asked if all white people were mean. What about the man he had been named after, Floyd S. Bixler, a white merchant from Pennsylvania whom his father had met while working as a bellhop at the Battery Park Hotel and who had sent the family boxes of clothing, sheets, and towels every few months for a decade? Was he mean? No, his father replied. “He is an entirely different man, and as you grow older you will find out that there are two kinds of white people, good white people and bad white people. But there are a whole lot more bad white people than there are good.”
McKissick never forgot that day. It was the day he first experienced the “double consciousness” W. E. B. Du Bois had described twenty-three years earlier, in The Souls of Black Folk. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness,” Du Bois observed. “One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” Or, as McKissick put it in his autobiography, it was the day he learned he wasn’t just a boy. He was a Black boy—“a black boy in a white land. And just by being alive, by getting born, I had inherited a world that hated me—a whole bunch of mean people I never saw, but who were waiting there to tell me, ‘Get your black ass to the back.’”
Childhood was not all harsh lessons and bitter reality. As McKissick also wrote, “You can’t be black full-time. Not as a child. The woods are green, even for Negroes.” And for a Negro boy in the 1920s, Asheville was, all things considered, a surprisingly green wood. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, it was a small, close-knit community where everyone knew everyone; when Thomas Wolfe published his autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel, in 1929, even McKissick’s parents recognized many of its characters. The second of four children and the only boy, McKissick was a rambunctious, sociable child who spent most days outside, roller skating down the city’s treacherous hills, swimming in the creek that ran near his house, or fishing in the French Broad River. On weekends, he played baseball in Stumptown, a Black neighborhood where all the trees had been chopped down. And at night, he and his friends gathered in a grove across from his house and took part in that ancient boyhood ritual of insulting one another’s mothers.
Within this world, McKissick was a leader, an instigator, and a prankster, the kind of boy who would run behind a peach truck, lower the tailgate, and catch the peaches as they rolled off. But mostly he was a hustler, in the best sense of the word. At various points growing up he worked as a busboy, a waiter, a bellhop, a window washer, and a field hand. He shined shoes and raked leaves, sold soft drinks and newspapers. In the fall, he would hike into the hills to pick apples and chestnuts, and on hot summer days he would buy a fifty-pound block of ice and pull it around the neighborhood in a wagon, selling it off chunk by chunk before it melted. His best customer was a bootlegger named Charlie Brown who lived next door. When a new batch of liquor arrived, Brown would tell McKissick to fetch some peaches to give it flavor. Then when the customers showed up, McKissick would bring ice for their drinks and fish to make sandwiches.
Racism wasn’t as pronounced in Asheville as elsewhere in the South. White residents liked to boast that slavery had never existed in their town. That was a fiction: although the mountainous terrain made plantations impractical, most businessmen and professionals had kept at least one person in slavery, and by 1850 enslaved people made up 13 percent of the town’s population. But unlike other areas of the South, Asheville’s economy had not been built on slavery, so its support for secession had been lukewarm and its response to emancipation subdued. Asheville was also less physically segregated than many other southern communities. Instead of being confined to one or two neighborhoods, Black residents were scattered in pockets across town, the better to serve their white bosses. The McKissick home on Magnolia Street straddled one of these pockets, so that all their front-yard neighbors were Black and all their backyard neighbors were white.
Still, race was a defining fact of life in Asheville. And although McKissick had a happy childhood, he was continually reminded of the lesson he had learned on the trolley years before: he was a Black boy in a white land. It was a lesson he resented when he and his sisters visited their father at the hotel where he worked and were told to wait in a back room. A lesson he recoiled from when word spread that a white girl in the neighborhood had kissed him and her family was forced to move. And a lesson he rebelled against when he was turned away from the soapbox derby because of his skin color, only to sneak in anyway and finish in first place.
If these insults made clear to McKissick where he stood in American society, it was an incident several years later that persuaded him what to do about it. He was thirteen at the time, a member of a Black Boy Scout troop that was sponsoring a skating competition on French Broad Avenue, a gently sloping street near downtown. As one of the troop’s best skaters, he was assigned to stand guard at the starting line and look after the younger kids. Wearing his uniform and a pair of metal skates strapped to his shoes, he was corralling the racers behind the line when one of them drifted into an adjoining street. McKissick darted out to catch the boy, and as he skated back to the starting line two policemen rode up on motorcycles and berated him. When he tried to explain what had happened, one of the officers became enraged. Removing a heavy glove and gripping it by the fingers, he slapped McKissick twice across the face, knocking him to the ground. “Don’t talk back to me,” he barked before ordering McKissick to take off his skates. As McKissick pulled at the straps, he tried once more to explain and looked for an adult to confirm his story. The officer slapped him again and pulled out his nightstick. Before he could strike, McKissick removed his skate and swung it hard, knocking the baton out of the officer’s hand. “You crazy black son of a bitch,” the officer shouted. “Now I’ll kill you.” By this time, one of the scoutmasters saw what was happening and rushed over, pleading with the officer. “He’s just a kid. He don’t know no better.” Soon other officers arrived to defuse the situation, and McKissick was handcuffed and taken to the police station.
He was met there by his father and a group of Black leaders who had heard about the incident and hurried to the station. The police threatened to throw McKissick in jail, but the leaders persuaded them to release the boy into his father’s custody until trial. Two weeks later, McKissick appeared in court with his parents and the same group of Black men. One of them was a prominent minister who apologized on McKissick’s behalf and begged the judge for mercy. McKissick’s father also spoke, telling the judge (falsely) that he had already punished his son and would keep him out of trouble. The judge was swayed. Advising the elder McKissick to give his son a good thrashing, he dismissed the case and sent the boy home.
Prior to that moment, McKissick had planned to become a preacher, like his grandfathers on both sides; he had even promised his maternal grandfather he would follow in his footsteps. But the skating incident showed him the power of law and, more specifically, of lawyers. He saw that preachers had no authority; they could only beg and plead with white judges and prosecutors, who called them “boy” and made jokes at their expense. To be truly protected, one needed a lawyer. Lawyers were given respect and a voice within the system. But there were no Black lawyers in Asheville, and most white lawyers wouldn’t represent Black clients. So McKissick decided he would become a lawyer and use the law to protect himself and the members of his race.
The skating incident also turned him into an activist. Although the judge warned him to watch his step, he could no longer ignore the injustices he saw. The day after his trial, a librarian at school handed him a copy of The Crisis, the magazine published by the NAACP. That same week he became a member of the organization. Soon, he was working with an NAACP investigator to document lynchings in the eastern part of the state. And several years later, when Asheville officials denied the actor and activist Paul Robeson a permit to speak at a public auditorium, McKissick joined a delegation to protest the decision before the city council. The protest failed, but McKissick emerged as the group’s leader, proving that the trolley conductor had been right after all: he was going to get into a hell of a lot of trouble.
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MCKISSICK LEFT ASHEVILLE in 1940 to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta. He was in his sophomore year when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and he enlisted in the army a month later. Despite a recruiter’s promise that he could join the Army Air Forces, he was sent to the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center at Fort Bragg, where, because of his college background, he was assigned to teach math to white soldiers. From there, he was sent to the Thirteenth Engineer Special Brigade, which supported the tank divisions of the US Third Army, commanded by General George Patton. McKissick saw action in the battles of Metz and Rouen and was part of the Third Army’s final push into Germany. During one engagement, he was hit in the head with shrapnel, for which he received a Purple Heart.
But the experience that affected him most came after the war, in French villages that had been destroyed by shells and aerial bombing. In the towns of Lille, Tourcoing, and Roubaix, along the Belgian border, McKissick and his unit helped clear rubble, pave streets, and repair town squares. And as he watched French engineers and planners slowly put their cities back together, he wondered why Black people couldn’t do the same thing back home. “If we can spend all this time over in Europe building, we can sure go back down South and build,” he told friends and relatives when he returned to the States in December 1946. But the reality of life at home made clear that his dream would have to wait. Although Blacks had played a critical role in the war, their status in America was unchanged. They were still discriminated against in jobs and public accommodations, still sent to segregated schools, still turned away at the polls. The likelihood that Congress would invest in new cities built by Blacks was next to zero.
McKissick and his wife, Evelyn, shortly after they were married in 1942.
Besides, by that point McKissick was married, with two young daughters to support. So he put aside his dream and returned to Morehouse to complete his degree. Now even more committed to racial justice, he joined the newly formed Progressive Party and campaigned for its candidate, Henry Wallace, in the 1948 presidential election. He also got his first taste of nonviolent direct action, taking part in the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. Organized by a fledgling civil rights group called the Congress of Racial Equality, the journey was designed to test a recent Supreme Court ruling that states could not require segregated seating on interstate bus routes. For two weeks, Black and white activists rode Greyhound and Trailways buses through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, defying demands that they separate. McKissick joined the group in Chapel Hill, then traveled to Asheville, Knoxville, and Washington, DC. The journey was dangerous and harrowing. In one town, a group of taxi drivers attacked the riders, then pursued them to the home of a local minister. At other stops, riders were taunted, harassed, and arrested. But the journey showed the power of nonviolent resistance and would serve as the model for a series of more famous bus rides fourteen years later.
After finishing at Morehouse in 1948 (the same year as King, who was seven years younger and thus avoided the war), McKissick enrolled at North Carolina College School of Law, an all-Black institution the state had opened to avoid integrating the University of North Carolina. There, he led protests demanding equal funding and the repeal of trespass statutes being used to thwart civil rights demonstrations. He also became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging segregation at UNC. Litigated by Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, the case ended up in the federal appeals court in Richmond, which ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. McKissick had already earned enough credits to graduate, but he enrolled in UNC summer classes anyway and left his family to live in a dorm on campus. His classmates were not kind. They hid snakes in his bed, poured water on his clothes, and knocked over his tray in the cafeteria. McKissick, as usual, fought back. After his tray was knocked over for the third time, he announced loudly that he wouldn’t let it happen again (it didn’t). And when he heard that the campus swimming pool was still segregated, he jumped in with his clothes on and declared, “It’s integrated now.”
With his law degree in hand, McKissick opened an office on Main Street in Durham. Like any young lawyer, he took whatever work came his way—property disputes, insurance claims, criminal defense. But his focus was civil rights law, and over the next decade he took on hundreds of cases challenging segregation and defending the right of peaceful protest. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, he and his wife, Evelyn, filed suit to integrate the Durham public schools. The city prevailed on a technicality but, sensing the inevitable, it permitted a small number of Black students, including McKissick’s two oldest children, to attend white schools in the fall of 1959. For the children, Joycelyn and Andree, it was a costly victory. Like their father, they faced the wrath of classmates, who cut patches out of their hair, spilled ink on their dresses, and doused their heads with cold water. But that was life as a McKissick, which blurred the line between family and the movement. Their modest frame house was not just a home; it was a staging ground for protests, a gathering spot for Black leaders, and a guesthouse for activists. At any moment, the children might be called upon to march, boycott, or go to jail (Joycelyn once spent a month behind bars rather than pay a fifty-dollar fine). They were also accustomed to the threats their father received by phone and mail. They would often come home from school to find a group of men on the porch, guarding the house with guns. And whenever they ate at a restaurant, they noticed that their father, like many Black leaders, never sat with his back to the door.
By the end of the 1950s, McKissick had become a controversial figure, hailed by some, despised by others. But his career in the spotlight was just beginning.
Copyright © 2021 by Thomas Healy
