Floyd McKissick
Civil Rights Maverick
Title: Floyd McKissick, Civil Rights Maverick
Author: Jim Stokely
Permission to publish granted by author
Floyd McKissick, Sr., one of Asheville’s most distinguished native sones, was born in 1922 on Ridge Street, exactly one year before Stephens-Lee High School would be built one street over. Floyd’s father worked as the head bellman for the Vanderbilt Hotel and also as an agent for the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. His mother could sew well enough that “We had a sign on the house, Seamstress.”
Two incidents sensitized young Floyd to the plight of Blacks. The first occurred on a Montford Avenue trolley car, when Floyd sat up front to watch the driver. While his aunt explained to him why he couldn’t sit there, a heavyset white man “told her if she couldn’t get me up, he was going to pick me up and throw me to the rear of the bus…And my aunt picked me up and took me to the back and she just cried as she sat there with me.”
The second incident took place while roller skating on “a very smooth street, South French Broad, at which time I was assigned by my scout master to direct traffic and help the smaller kids…Some cops came up and said get off the street…And in trying to explain to them, they proceeded to beat and slap me around a little bit, and I retaliated by throwing a skate.” Floyd avoided jail time only through the entreaties of his father.
“Well, I think I’ve always been an activist in the civil rights movement,” McKissick recalled in his 1989 interview with Bruce Kalk. [i] “That started from the incident where I was beaten by the cops in Asheville, North Carolina.” After serving as a sergeant on the European front during World War II, McKissick graduated from North Carolina College and was a member of the first cohort of Black students to be admitted to UNC’s Law School at Chapel Hill. As a lawyer in Durham, he took on civil rights cases and came to the attention of national civil rights leaders. In 1966 Floyd McKissick succeeded James Farmer as the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality(CORE).
At CORE, McKissick supported Stokely Carmichael’s impassioned 1966 call for Black Power. Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), emphasized the ballot and, as necessary, direct confrontation. McKissick took a more pragmatic approach. In 3/5 of a Man, his excellent 1969 overview of Blacks in American history, Floyd McKissick offered his own interpretation of Black Power: “Unless the Black Man attains economic influence, any ‘political independence’ will be an illusion.”
Following his 1966-67 service as CORE’s national director, McKissick envisioned a Black-managed, multi-racial, planned community in northeastern North Carolina. Soul City, he hoped, would stand as a model for rural development and for Black autonomy. McKissick took much criticism for supporting Richard Nixon in the 1972 Presidential election, but ensuing Federal grants helped build needed infrastructure for the fledgling Soul City. Unfortunately, the combination of economic recession in the 1970s and vehement political opposition from Senator Jesse Helms prevented sufficient investment to attract industry and residents. The dream of Soul City withered. McKissick was appointed a Federal district judge in June of 1990, but he died of lung cancer less than a year later at the age of 69.
Floyd and his wife Evelyn Williams McKissick, whom he married in 1942, raised a strong family. Their son, Floyd Jr., serves in the North Carolina State Senate. Their eldest daughter Jocelyn was the first Black female student to graduate from Durham High School (1960). Their middle daughter Audree and her friend Henry Vickers integrated Carr Junior High School in 1959. Their youngest daughter, Charmaine McKissick-Melton, taught mass communications for 15 years at North Carolina Central University before retiring to the home originally built in Soul City by her father, Floyd McKissick, Sr.
[i] Interview with Floyd McKissick Sr. by Bruce H. Kalk, May 31, 1989. Interview L-0040, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sohp.org.
