Floyd McKissick

Floyd Bixler McKissick was born on the ninth of March 1922 at Asheville, North Carolina, the son of Ernest Boyce McKissick — a Black hotel-bellman of the Asheville Battery Park Hotel — and Magnolia Esther McKissick. He was raised in the segregated Black-Asheville mountain-town community of the inter-war period.

He was placed at the Stephens-Lee High School at Asheville and at the Morehouse College at Atlanta, where he completed the bachelor’s in 1948 — having interrupted the bachelor’s programme for service in the United States Army from 1942 to 1946. He served the Army across the European theatre of operations as a sergeant of the 92nd Infantry Division and was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star.

He applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law in 1949 — having been admitted on the academic record but rejected by the trustees on racial-segregation grounds. He filed the appropriate federal-court desegregation lawsuit on the strength of the post-Sweatt v. Painter precedent, with the legal support of the NAACP-LDF.

The federal District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina decided McKissick v. Carmichael on the fifth of October 1951 in favor of McKissick — the principal post-Sweatt federal-court desegregation case at a major southern state law school. McKissick was the first African American admitted to the University of North Carolina Law School at Chapel Hill — on the twenty-second of September 1951 — and the first African American admitted to any major southern state university law school.

He completed the LL.B. at the University of North Carolina Law School in 1952 and was admitted to the North Carolina state bar in 1952. He opened a private legal practice at Durham, North Carolina in 1952 — the principal Black-Durham private legal practice of the post-war period and the firm that defended the principal North Carolina civil-rights sit-in cases of the early 1960s.

He served as chair of the Durham branch of the Congress of Racial Equality from 1960 onward — the principal Durham CORE organising figure of the 1960s lunch-counter sit-in campaigns — and the principal Durham counsel of the closing-period CORE sit-in cases.

He was named on the third of January 1966 the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality — succeeding James Farmer at the position. He served the CORE national directorship for two years through to the closing months of 1968.

McKissick directed the CORE national directorship across the period of the principal Black Power philosophical re-orientation of the organisation. The 1966 CORE national convention at Baltimore on the second of July 1966 — chaired by McKissick — adopted the Black Power resolution that marked the post-civil-rights philosophical re-orientation of the civil-rights movement.

He founded in 1968 the Soul City Foundation at Warren County, North Carolina — a non-profit corporation organised to develop a Black-owned planned community at a former two-thousand-acre tobacco plantation purchased from the Hardie family for the construction of the Soul City new town. Soul City received over twenty million dollars of federal Department of Housing and Urban Development financing across the closing years of the 1960s and the 1970s under the New Communities programme of the Federal Government.

He was elected on the third of December 1990 the principal District Court judge of the Ninth District Court of North Carolina — the first African American District Court judge of the post-Reconstruction North Carolina.

He died at Soul City, North Carolina on the twenty-eighth of April 1991 of complications of cancer, at sixty-nine.

He is honored here as the principal Black director of the CORE.